Read a Burned Book

Freadom has launched a great new effort to raise awareness of the Castro regime's record of book burning: the Read a Burned Book campaign. To quote Freadom's January 23rd press release:

Some of the most famous Cuban writers have joined with the head of Cuba’s major independent library group in endorsing a new “Read A Burned Book” campaign, aimed at getting high school and college students to read the books which Fidel Castro has ordered burned.

“Castro can destroy everything, except for books,” said legendary Cuban revolutionary and author, Carlos Franqui. “He may censor, ban or even burn them, but the ideas contained in books can never be destroyed.”

“As José Martí once said, paper trenches are stronger than those built in stone," said Franqui, a former confidante of Castro, and the editor of one of the hundreds of books that were ordered burned in 2003.

“In our homes, the homes of many of us who promote liberty and the defense of human rights in Cuba, books are frequently confiscated,” said Gisela Delgado Sablon, the Director of the Independent Library Project of Cuba. “Among those have been books about Martin Luther King Jr., the great American civic fighter who fought for the rights of blacks.”

Sablon, speaking from a phone in Havana, said books like Kings “are regarded as dangerous to society,” and she justified the need for independent libraries because readers have access “only to what the government designates for them to read.”


For more on this worthy effort, see the Freadom blog, which has numerous posts on this topic.