Reply #34: For years we've been financing, underwriting political "dissidents" in Cuba,

[Judi Lynn]

at an enormous price, buying their services to antagonize and disrupt their government, to write articles against the Cuban government, and generally raise hell.

Our Interests Section heads have thrown open the doors to them, and they come and go to the Interests Section at all times of the day and night, have meals there, use all the office equipment, and also have been given their own office materials through the non-volunteered auspices of the American taxpayers.

If this were to happen in THIS country, people would be going to jail here, and that's no joke. It's ILLEGAL HERE. It CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. FORBIDDEN BY LAW. Yet, each year, more millions are allocated by Congress to fork over to these "brave" "dissidents," or U.S. employees to make as much trouble as possible.

You recall the hellish noise that surrounded a luncheon given for Al Gore when people thought he was taking money from Chinese nuns, or something similar. All hell broke loose for a while.

Hokey "independent librarians" have likewise been enlisted, under the claim Cuba doesn't allow Cubans to read any books, by golly! They are ALSO on the gravy train from Washington.

You just might find this article on U.S.-paid "independent librarians" very interesting:

June 18 / 19, 2005

Librarians as Spooks?
The Scheme to Infiltrate Cuba's Libraries
By DIANA BARAHONA

The U.S. has been pretty successful at mobilizing world opinion against Cuba since the late 1980s. Emboldened by the fall of the Soviet Union it has gone to considerable trouble and expense to bring down the revolution that refuses to be defeated a scant 90 miles off the empire's shore. Part of this effort has involved creating an artificial opposition movement on the island and enlisting liberal organizations and intellectuals to support it. But U.S. librarians, targeted by name in the State Department's 400-page destabilization blueprint, the Report to the President of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, not only refuse to play the game but are trying to assist their Cuban colleagues to improve their libraries.

The rent-an-opposition has several components: independent trade union groups, independent journalists, independent political parties and independent libraries ­ all paid and directed by the U.S. Interests Section. They are also composed of the same people; one person may be an independent press agency, a political party, and run a library out of his house. The depth of U.S.-style "civil society" was evident May 20-21 at the Congress of the Cuban Dissident Movement in Havana. Financed with a special congressional grant of $6 million and featuring a videotaped greeting from Bush himself, this gathering was supposed to bring together 360 dissident organizations; it barely drew 100 people.

Cuba not only has libraries, it has a lot of them ­ 400 to be precise, plus 6,000 school libraries. So why has the State Department created a network of independent libraries there? What exactly is an independent library? Rhonda L. Neugebauer and Larry Oberg, both university librarians, went to Cuba to meet with colleagues and study the library system in 2000. But they also visited the so-called independent libraries run out of people's houses. What they found were carefully-chosen drop-off and contact points for personnel from the U.S. Interests Section and others, who visited them on a regular basis to deliver materials and money. They also discovered that by keeping bookshelves with these materials in their homes, the "librarians" qualified for a monthly stipend ­ "for services rendered," as one of them put it. They found no evidence that anyone ever checked out a book, and when they enquired of neighbors, nobody even seemed to know the libraries were there.

But the story doesn't end there. For years Neugebauer has been trying to set up a program of exchange and assistance to Cuba's real libraries, which not only lack funding for books and journals, but also for copying and computer equipment, and phone lines and technical support for internet access. But she and others are confronting a heated campaign to get the American Librarian Association and related organizations to condemn the Cuban government and support the independent libraries, waged by a New York librarian named Robert Kent.

Kent founded an organization called Friends of Cuban Libraries in 1999. When he traveled to Cuba in May of that same year, Kent made contact with Aleida Godínez, an intelligence agent posing as a dissident. According to Godínez, Kent introduced himself as Robert Emmet and even held a passport with that name. He said he had come as an emissary of Frank Calzon, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.



"Robert Emmet" and Aleida Godinez.

"Emmet" didn't bring books or spend any time studying libraries; "He put a lot of emphasis on the role of the independent press," says Godínez. "He said absolutely nothing about the so-called independent libraries. He barely mentioned to me that he was a librarian."

Instead, Kent arrived with surveillance equipment ("a camera, a shortwave radio, a 10-band transmitter and receiver, and a watch, a Cassio brand") and lots of cash, which he passed out to various dissidents. But the most disturbing aspect of the librarian's visit was that he allegedly asked Godinez to help him ­ with drawings and photographs ­ map out the security measures at the home of Vice President of the Council of State, Carlos Lage Davila. Godínez says he gave her $100 for film for that purpose. Understandably, "Emmet" was detained and expelled for espionage.

As if this weren't weird enough, 1999 is the same year the founder of Reporters Without Borders, Robert Menard, went to Cuba, and the behavior of the two men was identical. Both came as friends of Calzón and both arrived with cash and electronic equipment and sought out dissidents. Both asked questions unrelated to the ostensible purpose of their trips: Menard asked his contact, also an undercover agent, if he knew of any "disgruntled" people in the Cuban armed forces. Kent says his numerous trips to Cuba were financed by Freedom House, a Miami-based outfit funded by the State Department.

http://www.counterpunch.org/barahona06182005.html

(By the way, the mural on the wall behind Aleida Godínez depicts the young Cuban teachers who were the first wave of Cuban educators, often teenagers who went out from the big cities out into the countryside and started teaching EVERYONE who could not read how to read immediately after the revolution.

They ordinarily went wherever the people were, and often sat around tables by lanternlight at night working with their students.

The counterinsurgents who were left in the hills physically assaulted them. Some of the teachers and their students were killed.

Here's a group photo of people celebrating the literacy program, waving their giant pencils in the air!



Here's an interesting quote from an article I found some years ago:

The idea was that only with higher literacy and education levels would the revolution, now creating a new government and a new society, be able to solve Cuba's social problems. "No creer, leer!" was the message: don't just believe, read! More than 100,000 young people, mostly teens, some younger, formed the core of 268,000 literacy teachers. The youngest was 7, shown below in his uniform and in his literacy campaign ID card.

http://www.communitytechnology.org/cuba/photos.html