Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number Five
The
Night I Prayed
for Castro, and What Happened Then:
A Meditation Prompted by a Current Controversy
Librarians who pay attention to such things may recall--from the
recesses of their World Trade Center-preoccupied noggins--seeing
recent coverage of the "independent library" question in Cuba.
The story of anti-Castro libraries, or "libraries," cropping up in
Cuba in defiance of state sanctions has appeared in places ranging
from American Libraries to the Washington Post,
as well as in some hot on-line exchanges about the matter. According
to an article by David Gonzalez in the June 6, 2001 New York
Times, there are approximately 60 such libraries in Cuba.
As most things do for the ever-solipsistic Uncle Frank, the
controversy awakens sleeping memory banks. Let us go back, back into
the dim recesses of a more innocent time…
Back when I was a kid, when everything was still in black and white,
I regularly watched the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday evening.
This was well before the Beatles, in the days of Eisenhower and U-2
flights over Russia and anxiety about a possible nuclear "exchange"
over a couple of islands--Quemoy and Matsu--that you've probably
never heard of unless you're of a certain age. I recall praying, as
an eight-year-old, I believe, that we would not blow up the world
over those two islands. As you'll soon see, I was just a prayin'
fool in those days.
Sometimes Big Ed featured some pretty good material, not the least
of which was a pre-bloated Elvis. Sometimes he put on some
hopelessly lame acts, most notably "the Italian Mouse," Topo Gigio. I hated that stupid puppet--and Ed had him on all the damned
time! The circus acts were also a complete waste of my family's
17-inch Admiral TV's screen, but it was a variety show, so nothing
lasted very long. The worst swill in show biz (viz., Topo Gigio)
might give way to something wonderful.
Fidel Meets Big Ed
From time to time Ed went a little off the wall, by 1950s American
television standards. One night in 1959, he ran a filmed interview
with Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries as they hunkered
down in the Cuban hills, before their upcoming push to kick dictator
Fulgencio Batista and his goons off the island. (Imagine the
bizarritude: It's the height of the Cold War, and here's Fidel
Castro on the Ed Sullivan Show! Holy moley, what next? Beaver
and Wally quoting Trotsky?)
At the time, my chief reading (aside from what I had to do for 7th
grade, which wasn't much, and much of that I didn't do with any
enthusiasm) consisted of Mad magazine (nearly at the apex of
its goodness--nothing like the poor thing it has declined to in the
present day), the Sporting News, and science fiction.
Somehow, though, I had come across some disturbing coverage of
Batista and his reign, possibly in the Reader's Digest.
(If it's in print, I'll read it. What the hell, eh?) When Big Ed ran
the interview with Fidel and the boys, my ears perked up and my eyes
widened.
"Wow," I thought, or something like that. Here are these bearded
guys up in the mountains, and they're out to free the Cuban people
from a rotten dictator! Cool! The Sullivan coverage was very
positive. The audience applauded when the interview was over; the
Sullivan audience always applauded the film clips.
“Imagine
the bizarritude:
It's the height of the Cold War,
and here's Fidel Castro on the
Ed Sullivan Show!
Holy moley, what next?
Beaver and Wally quoting Trotsky?”
Oh Dear God, Have a Cigar: My Hero Just Had a Revolution
I was knocked out. I went to bed that night, my heart astir with
revolutionary fervor. I couldn't sleep, thinking about the brave
Fidel and his men in their struggle against the loathsome Batista.
So carried away was I that, by God, I prayed for the success of the
revolutionaries! I lay right there in my bed, a touching testament
to the efficacy of Sunday school, and sent my best wishes for their
triumph Heavenward.
God answered my prayer. I admit before you now that I, a
pre-adolescent idealist romantic acting on the life-long
exhortations of my patriotic, Christian tutors, am (as far as I
know) singularly responsible for facilitating the Cuban Revolution
through my invocation of Divine Will. Yes, you can petition
the Lord with prayer!
As we all know, the U.S. did not respond with good grace to Castro's
ascension. Something about the new Cuban government nationalizing
corporate properties didn't sit well with freedom-loving Americans.
When our hostility to this sort of thing led Cuba to lean on the
Ruskies for support, we went berserk. JFK and the best and the
brightest nearly got us all killed at the high point of our pique
over the Cuban-Soviet dealing. If you weren't there, or weren't old
enough to pay attention, in that run of dark days in October of '62,
you can't imagine. We were getting ready to kiss our buns good-bye.
General anticipation held that they would soon be toasted, fried,
poached, and barbecued.
Some clever diplomatic correspondence kept us out of the fire, but
ever since that point, U.S. policy toward Cuba has shown a complete
absence of enlightened self-interest, to say nothing of basic humane
consideration for the Cuban people. By seeking to isolate Cuba, and
indulging in a breathtakingly stupid, vindictive obsession, the U.S.
government has helped provoke the worst in the Cuban government, and
has, almost without a doubt, helped insure that the point at which
Cuba enjoys true democratic life will continually recede with the
horizon, at least until some vague day after Fidel shuffles off to
his eternal reward--which will probably have him sharing hot seats
with fellow people's giants Mao and Stalin.
The Revolutionary Good Life
Fidel is a tyrant, and has been most of his career. He can't stand
criticism. He's a control freak with an extensive enforcement
network to help him maintain rigid authority. Bad things happen to
those who publicly question him or his policies. The Committee to
Protect Journalists, a nonpartisan, nonprofit org founded in 1981 (http://www.cpj.org/index.html),
this May included Fidel for the seventh time as one of the ten worst
enemies of the press in the world. He joins such insults to basic
notions of journalistic freedom as Iran's Ayatolla Khamenei,
Liberia's Charles Taylor, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, and Russia's
Vladimir Putin.
Fine company, indeed. Here is some of the CPJ's take on Fidel:
"Fidel Castro's government continues its scorched-earth assault on
independent Cuban journalists by interrogating and detaining
reporters, monitoring and interrupting their telephone calls,
restricting their travel, and routinely putting them under house
arrest to prevent coverage of certain events…. Cuba is the only
country in the Western Hemisphere that currently holds a journalist
in jail for his work. Bernardo Arevalo Padron continues to serve a
six year sentence for reporting critical of Castro and the Communist
Party."
Trying to recruit followers in opposition to the Cuban government is
a sure ticket to trouble. Amnesty International's 2001 report on
Cuba notes that Fidel's functionaries keep hundreds of people
imprisoned for political reasons. Cuba conducts kangaroo-court
trials of its political enemies, employs the death penalty with
vigor (maybe the Cuban officials could contact George W. for some
pointers), and, when in the mood, subjects prisoners to cruel and
inhuman treatment.
Any government that tries to control what its citizens read is evil.
There is but one legal political party in Cuba, Fidel's. According
to Amnesty International, in the period covered by its report,
"Individuals and groups peacefully exercising their rights to
freedom of expression, association and assembly continued to face
repression." There was "serious escalation in repression during the
closing months of 2000." Living the good life under Fidel, those who
attempt to organize meetings, express views or form organizations
opposing government policy are subject to short-term detention,
interrogation, threats, intimidation, eviction, loss of employment,
restrictions on travel, house searches, house arrests, phone bugging
and physical and verbal acts of aggression carried out by government
supporters.
Authoritarian governments never have a problem finding sociopaths
eager to help carry out "support" for official policies. It's nice
to know that gainful employment is available to those who would
otherwise find it difficult to make ends meet.
Independent Libraries, or
Outlets for U.S. Propaganda?
Curiously, authoritarian governments also don't have a hard time
finding sympathetic observers abroad. A good bit of the verbiage on
the "independent libraries" is sympathetic to the official Cuban
position: These libraries and the people who run them, or attempt to
run them, are enemies of revolutionary enlightenment. The major
point of concern for a number of U.S. librarians who support
official Cuban libraries seems to be whether the "independent
library" movement is truly independent, or whether it is simply one
more arm of the counter-revolutionary octopus encouraged by
U.S. policy.
The chief point of those who support the independent libraries is
that Cuba's official libraries are not free; they cannot offer the
reading public all points of view, particularly those of a political
stripe. Official Cuban libraries are, on one level, tools the
dictatorship employs to help control the reading, hence the thinking
and political behavior, of the Cuban people.
Are They, or Aren't They?
Some critics of the independent libraries attack them because they
are not "real" libraries run by "real" librarians; those assembling
collections of forbidden literature are not positively sanctioned
and certified by the authorities. Well, honestly: Uncle Frank is
shocked.
There is something a little disingenuous about arguing that only
"real" librarians can assemble "real" libraries in an authoritarian
state, or anywhere else, for that matter. Countless private
dwellings and other facilities on the planet contain what over the
centuries people have called "libraries." Some have been very
impressive libraries. Some, little dinky libraries. Although the
great majority of these libraries were not, and are not, built by
professional librarians, it strains reason to suggest that they do
not deserve to be called libraries.
One fears that only a self-conscious professional snootiness (a
quality, alas, not unknown in libraryland) would permit a librarian
to sight down his or her uplifted nose and declare a collection of
literature "not a library" because it does not occupy an
officially-approved library building, or because no professional
librarian had a hand in its creation, or because it is not
impressively large.
Perfectly Clear and Precious
The U.S. government (or at least some of its leading advocates of
retro-think) is eager to provide financial support to the
independent libraries. With U.S. money at their disposal, these
facilities would more easily spread their message.
So what? If the ideas thus advanced did not reflect the values of
the Cuban people, they would fall on dry ground and quickly wither.
Can it be that after four decades of Fidel, the virtues of the
revolutionary government are not perfectly clear and precious to
those who enjoy them daily? What, then, do Cuban officials fear from
these pitiful "independent libraries"--run by people who are not
even (gasp!) real librarians--and why do their U.S. critics worry
about the sources of their funding? Is it possible that the Cuban
government and its U.S. friends do not enjoy complete confidence
that the Cuban people share their faith in the fruits of the
revolution? That Cubans might want to try other possibilities in the
political orchard?
That is terribly hard to imagine, unless one reflects on the
observations on Cuban political and intellectual life put forward by
such groups as Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect
Journalists.
Sometimes I suspect that the romantic notions of noble rebellion
that I entertained the night I saw Fidel and the boys on the Ed
Sullivan Show are much the same as those animating today's
defenders and admirers of the Cuban regime, regardless of the
subtopic (libraries, health care, literacy, whatever). I will not
apologize for having been naïve at the age of 12, or for having
prayed for Fidel's success. Batista was a thug, and deserved to go
down. What is Fidel today?
"Don't follow leaders; watch the parking meters."
Bob Dylan said that. (He didn't say that Fidel's time has expired.)
Any government that tries to control what its citizens read is evil.
Uncle Frank said that.
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Graphics by Karen McGinnis