Independent Libraries Cuba JGA

• The most well known player of the White House directed “independent library” campaign is New Yorker Robert Kent, alias Robert Emmet who, in 1999, founded an organization called Friends of Cuban Libraries in support of the so-called “independent” libraries created on the island under the auspices of the U.S. Interest Section (USIS).

This group of less than a dozen members has devised a campaign within the ALA (American Library Association) and in the International Federations of Library Associations (IFLA) to promote condemnation of Cuba.

The ALA and various other library organizations, including the Canadian Librarian Group, the Progressive Librarians Guild and the Cuban Library Solidarity Group located in London, sent investigation groups to Cuba which concluded that the so-called independent libraries, for the most part, barely have books and have no professional librarians or readers.

However, all of the people involved in this network share the characteristic of maintaining questionable relations with the USIS in Havana, which recruited, paid, supplied equipment to and used them for its own needs in a network directly managed by the U.S. intelligence service.

Both the ALA and the IFLA have publicly criticized the U.S. government and have exposed its maneuvers to prohibit access by genuine Cuban libraries to informational materials.

The same U.S. administration that spends millions annually to falsely charge Cuba of blocking the free circulation of books has held hundreds of books in English destined for the University of Havana Library at the Mexican border since July 21 last year.

The books are part of a consignment confiscated from the Pastors for Peace Friendship Caravan by U.S. Customs officials at the McAllen, Texas border crossing, acting under specific orders from the Department of Trade. •

Agent Kent gets a new assistant

BY JEAN GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—

• CIA collaborator Robert Kent, inventor of the miniscule Friends of Cuban Libraries group dedicated to spreading disinformation on Cuba to library organizations, has been assigned a new assistant. Pursuing the plan to join forces with East Europeans in order to attack Cuban socialism, the obsessive New Yorker has carried out his latest operation against the American Library Association in cooperation with a U.S. poet of Romanian origin, Andrei Codrescu.

This individual is the third pseudo-European recruited by Kent to help with his plan to create a parallel between Eastern Europe and Cuba at all costs, a maneuver that doubtlessly corresponds to the strategy of the anti-Cuba think tank located in the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Actually Codrescu is not his true name it is the surname that Romanian Andrei Perlmutter selected one day in order to create a new image for himself. Jewish by birth and religion, he felt it convenient — for some reason that only he knows — to discard the family name that associated him with this community and assume one identifying the country of his birth on December 20, 1946, in Sibiu, Transylvania.

Perlmutter/Codrescu abandoned his country in 1965 at the age of 19, going to Italy and France where he unsuccessfully tried to settle before crossing the Atlantic and discovering his new homeland. To put this in context, that was the year when Nicolae Ceauºescu became first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Romania.

Young Codrescu turned up in the United States in 1966, where he began his immersion in New York by hanging around Allen Ginsberg and his troupe then in fashion in the East Village. It was then that he first used a fictitious name to publish poems that were regarded as mediocre. He signed them as Maria Pardfenie and he continued using women’s names until his recent transformation. In fact it was not his literary prose that made this Romanian known in the United States, but a National Public Radio (NPR) program titled “All Things Considered,” for which he became somewhat famous. Andrei Codrescu always used his status as an “immigrant from a communist country” to secure an audience in a country where McCarthyism apparently has indestructible roots. He obtained his U.S. citizenship in 1981.

Without a doubt it was his virulent anti-communist stance that afforded him opportunities such as his current position as a professor at the University of New Orleans despite that fact that he never graduated from an institution of this level.

It also explains his presence at the side of a character like Robert Kent, itinerant agent of the "Friends of Cuban Libraries".

Two very particular missions have illustrated Codrescu’s political development. December 1989, the poet-commentator was assigned the task of observing the changes occurring in Romania from within. The book that resulted from this peregrination, The Hole in the Flag, received a barrage of criticism, especially for the many chronological and geographical errors it contained.

In 1998, he repeated this offense after a visit to Havana with Ay, Cuba: a Socio-Erotic Journey, a repugnant work that highlights his fascination with adolescents. Codrescu, who doesn’t speak three words of Spanish, visited the island for two days in order to write a text full of disdain and, once again, full of nonsense.

MILLIONS TO THE DIRTY WAR

The United States spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars per annum to attack Cuba. The administration that abandoned the predominantly African-American community of New Orleans maintains an expensive propagandistic apparatus based in Southern Florida to damage the island’s image. For carrying out these campaigns, Kent is trying to harness the mysterious “support” of Eastern Europe. At the last World Congress of Librarians in Oslo, it was revealed that the “Czech connection” which Kent tried to utilize was put together by a U.S. military intelligence official of Czech origin. “Stanley” or “Stan” Kalkus emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Austria in 1948 and later to the United States in 1951, where he settled in Chicago. Merely 12 months after his arrival in the United States he was recruited by its military intelligence. Kalkus then joined the U.S. armed forces and spent many years “working” for the intelligence branch in various parts of the world.

The “Czech librarian” Stanislav “Stan” Kalkus still lives – at least six months of the year – at his real residence in Newport, Rhode Island.

The East Europe connection that Kent has bragged about on various occasions involves other individuals like Silvia Stasselova, head of the “information center” at the Slovakia Technical University library. Stasselova is also known as the president of the “Slovakia Librarian Association.” However, this association is not the National Association of Librarians created in 1920, but a separate association created in 1990.

Another Eastern European buddy of agent Kent in his Cuban adventures and misadventures is Wojciech Siemaszkiewicz, a Pole from Krakow who was a professional "dissident" in his time. A colleague of Kent in the New York Public Library, he lives in New Jersey, where he is known for his ultra-right proselytizing. In this state adjoining New York, in 2001 he tried to obtain …the Republican candidacy for Senate. He failed. •