A DVD recording of Mr. Codrescu’s address, Mr. Gorman’s following address, and the question and answer session is available from C-SPAN2 BookTV, at
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=191267-1&tID=4&highlight=andrei%Codrescu%San%20Antonio.

GORMAN: Andrei, some comments.

CODRESCU: Well, let me ask you about this business with the Cuban librarians. What is going on with that?

GORMAN: I think the misunderstanding that’s arisen – there are people in ALA who have looked much more deeply into this question than I, but I think the question is not that ALA has failed to condemn suppression of literature, suppression of reading, suppression of freedom of inquiry anywhere in the world. I think the fact is that we have done so, and I can’t cite you chapter and verse, but I’m fairly certain that I remember the Council passing resolutions deploring the activities in this area of the Cuban government, which I am here today to tell you, I think are reprehensible and which are against everything that I stand for, as opposed to getting involved in a kind of political to and fro about the status of people who claim to be librarians and who are in many cases – and I’m not speaking now of the people in prison – these people should not be in prison. They should be freed immediately. They should never have been sentenced, sent to prison for the activities connected with any kind of dissemination of information or literature. But we do not want to get involved with the kind of politics which grows up around the Cuban exile community, the Republican Party, the Cuba – and the Cuban government. I think we have taken a principled stand on many, many occasions against suppression of thought in all countries.

CODRESCU: Well, it seems to me it isn’t a matter of general principle, because clearly the ALA stands for freedom to read. It is a case of specific suppression of librarians and libraries. It is a case of making a clear stand with these people who have been imprisoned for lending books, for being librarians. I don’t see why they would be called “so-called librarians” since clearly there’s no one to certify them in any way. They gathered books in their house and gave them to people who wanted to read them.

GORMAN: Well, I guess, you know, there is a dispute as to whether that activity is being a librarian, but the essential point is – and my memory I believe is correct on this – is that when we had the report of the Intellectual Freedom Committee and the International Relations Committee, that the ALA Council condemned the imprisonment of these people. The fact is that –

CODRESCU: But if people are still in prison –

GORMAN: Right. But we have been mischaracterized – Well, of course. You know,  they’re still spying on your conversations, but we condemn that. – The fact is that we have been misrepresented by Nat Hentoff, who I have a great deal of respect for in other fields, and by other people, particularly the gentleman you mentioned, Mr. Kent, who has consistently misrepresented ALA’s position. And I think there is some dispute about the funding of the people who claim to set up these libraries, whether they are libraries and librarians. It does not alter the fundamental fact that, if I have a collection in books in my house and I lend one of them to you, I am not being a librarian in that case – I’m being a citizen in a democracy, that that process should never be impeded. It should never be impeded in Cuba, it should never be impeded anywhere. We believe in the access to books and other reading matters anywhere in the world.

CODRESCU: Well, the man who lent us his books was a librarian, was our librarian. He was the – not the official librarian, because official librarians didn’t help us – he was somebody who did this because he loved books and he wanted us – especially young people – to read them.  He would have been arrested, he would have done a great deal of time, so as we would have. So I think that the American Library Association should make a stronger point in solidarity with these disseminators of books, which in my mind are librarians – I don’t know what else to call them.

GORMAN: Well, um, you – it depends how you define members of a profession. Let me –

CODRESCU: I mean we are talking about Cuba, where there is nothing to read. I mean the Cuban government –

GORMAN: Right.

CODRESCU: – forbids the –

GORMAN: Well, –

CODRESCU: publishing of literature. The Cubans –

GORMAN: OK.

CODRESCU: – have – Cuban writers live in exile for the most part – the real good ones have, you know, scattered all over. I emphasize [unintelligible] Cuban regime –

GORMAN: There is another reason for the absence of literature in Cuba, and it’s the American embargo on trade with Cuba –

CODRESCU: Nobody’s for the embargo, you know. The embargo has been used by Fidel Castro as a good excuse for keeping his people oppressed, and there is no question in my mind about this. I was in Cuba and spoke to a good many Cuban intellectuals who were against the embargo and said, lift the embargo and see what happens – Castro wouldn’t last another month.

GORMAN: And I wish they would.

CODRESCU: So do I.

GORMAN: Could I maybe just ask you a question on one of these cards, in the same area but slightly a wider issue?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: You suggested that ALA pass a resolution condemning Castro. Many librarians say that ALA has no business making such political statements and should stick to the library business – there are battles enough. How would you respond to those people?

CODRESCU: Well, the ALA is already involved in all kinds of politics. I mean the business of the Patriot Act, it certainly resounds to the credit of the organization and this is not a very farfetched leap, certainly. And it’s not condemning Castro – it’s condemning the policy of the Cuban government in suppression of freedom to read.

GORMAN: I think the point is that this person feels probably that we shouldn’t be passing anything on the Patriot Act or anything else that is not directly and minutely focused on librarianship. I’d just be interested in your views on that.

CODRESCU: Well, I think the American Library Association is one of the most articulate associations in our country. It has consistently taken positions in defense of freedom of speech and freedom to read and it’s a tradition that does it honor and should continue. (APPLAUSE)

GORMAN: Another related question:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What should the American Library Association do about censorship and intellectual repression in China, which is surely as extreme as in Cuba?

CODRESCU: Well it’s not quite as extreme as in Cuba, probably because the Chinese have a harder time controlling the Internet. But I would say probably the same thing – it should condemn repression wherever it is. I don’t think that it’s not - it is our business, if we’re talking about the world now that is connected in various ways and certainly the world that is becoming a big village of one kind or another. Some like the kind of village it’s becoming. Others are proposing another version. Some people call it globalization and others call it globality or globalité, which is something quite different. Certainly it’s our business. [Applause]  The difference actually was – between those words was made by a French poet who didn’t like what globalization had come to mean in economic terms.

GORMAN: OK.

CODRESCU: He proposed the term globalité as a way of –

GORMAN: Globalité is a way of thinking rather than a process.

CODRESCU: Exactly.

GORMAN: So on and so forth. I don’t know about you, but I love French intellectual life. I mean it is so rarified, and I always remember the story of someone who was called before some French scientific group who asked to demonstrate a machine who had semi-miraculous powers and demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction that it worked, and one of the panel said, “It obviously works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

CODRESCU: Ha, ha, ha, ha.  Nothing works in theory.

GORMAN:  [Chuckles]  Back to Cuba, alas. I’m reading these words off the cards. I don’t agree with them or anything.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Many pro-Castro activists and vocal ALA Councilors –

GORMAN: I imagine the people being referred to would reject both characterizations –

AUDIENCE QUESTION: – insist that Cuba’s literacy rate is unusually high, and that –

GORMAN: I, I, I – something to do with Robert Kent. That’s the only part I can read.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: How would you respond to that, given current political restrictions, and why do you think this high literacy rate has occurred?

CODRESCU: Well, those are the two main propaganda points of the Cuban regime – and also the now defunct regimes of Eastern Europe – were the high rate of literacy and the other was the free medical care. Both of those things, if you look at them closely, are not true. To begin with, medical care really is free, but it’s sort of nonexistent. I mean, you can, yeah, you can get it but there are no machines or medicines or well trained people to actually take care of that. And as for literacy, yes, people can read, but if they don’t have anything to read except state propaganda, what is that? It’s just a way to [APPLAUSE] it’s a way to actually create a kind of illiteracy, to destroy whatever initiative or reason one has for reading.

GORMAN: I have two more things on Cuba, and I hope maybe we could move on from that, after these.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Cuba has scho–

GORMAN: I’m just reading from the cards –

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Cuba has school, public and a national library with trained library professionals. Why have you chosen to ignore these professional librarians and only bring forward Cubans with personal library collections?

GORMAN: And I’ll read a second one –

CODRESCU: Well, simply because the Cubans who serve in state libraries are state employees of the Cuban state and they are half policemen. They’re there to patrol and police the books rather than to make them available, and a lot of those books are not available. So, you know, if we are going to define librarians maybe we should also talk about, you know, what percentage of policemen is in them.  [Laughter]

GORMAN: Well, it – I think that’s true but I’m old enough to have been active in European librarianship when we had various technical meetings between various countries and one of the people that contributed more than almost anyone else to a particular committee I was on was an employee of the East German National Library – you know, a very fine librarian with a lot of technical skills and so on and so forth. So I think we must recognize that there are people in situations where they are professionals, they’re trying to do whatever they can. It also reminds me of another story. I was asked to speak – I think 25 years ago now – to a library association meeting in South Africa, and I wrote back – I was a lot younger then – and I wrote back saying I wouldn’t go because they were a segregated library associated, I didn’t want to be associated with them, etc., etc., and I received a heart-breaking letter back from a librarian in Johannesburg – an Afrikaner – saying that, you know, they are just so cut off, that they were trying to reach out to the wider world, etc, etc. But I still didn’t go and I always thought that was a kind of moral dilemma, because I had professional colleagues under that wicked regime who were just trying to do their best under these appalling circumstances.

CODRESCU: I’m sure there were some. Clearly there were some in Romania as well, but part of their work was to see who could get access to books and how and so in a way they were playing the game of the regime.

GORMAN: Of course. 

CODRESCU: Even though they personally despised it.

GORMAN: Segregated libraries of this country 40 or more years ago. And lastly, I hope:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Don’t you feel people who are paid by another country to try to overthrow the U.S. government with propaganda materials should be arrested? Please check your facts on the Cuban situation.

CODRESCU: Well, that’s – that question almost doesn’t merit an answer. It’s its own answer.

GORMAN: I think it may be a miswriting, maybe it’s overthrow the Cuban government. It says the U.S. government. But anyway –

CODRESCU: Yeah, I think people should overthrow all governments. [LAUGHTER and Applause]

GORMAN: OK, I can see the deadlines: “An–

CODRESCU: Ha, ha, ha, ha!  [Laughter]

GORMAN: – “Anarchist Addresses Pinko Commie Librarians.” [LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE]

CODRESCU: Blindsided from way left.

GORMAN: This is going to be televised. You know, my –

CODRESCU: Oh, good!

GORMAN: Thank God I’m not – [LAUGHTER] – I’m retiring soon.

> SKIP <

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Is there historical record of the importance of the role of libraries in changing despotic governments, or is the evidence arrived at from censorship? It seems that America is proof to the contrary – in spite of a wealth of information and encouraged access, the public seems to favor ignorance. Just providing books does not make people read or think.

CODRESCU: It’s an excellent point. But the books were essential to – they are essential to repressive regimes. The whole idea of revolution began in the dank basement of the print shop. The pamphlets and the radical literature that eventually ended up unsettling societies came from printers and the early – the technology of the book. And so, naturally, I mean, the reason that those regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union lasted as long as they did is because they had an almost awesome sacred fear of the book, and so they certainly lent it a great deal of the aura of mystery that books have. But on the other hand, it was the books themselves, it was absolutely – maybe their fear of them and it was harder – and the fact that they were forbidden made them more desirable. But I don’t think that’s the chief reason why books contributed to the overthrow of those regimes or the end of the police states in Eastern Europe and in Russia.

> SKIP <

AUDIENCE QUESTION: How do you feel about the discrimination and repression practiced by “radical liberal librarians” against those in the profession who are more conservative ideologically and politically?

CODRESCU: Well –

GORMAN: I feel very bad about it. How do you feel about it?

CODRESCU: I feel terrible.

GORMAN: Yeah, it’s really [Laughter] – it’s keeping me awake nights, too. It’s like Hollywood’s suppression of the people.

> SKIP <

AUDIENCE QUESTION: For Michael and Andrei: what are you currently reading?

CODRESCU: Well, I’m currently reading all the novels of Michael Harington that I can find. He wrote the Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, among other. A novel called With. Because I have a great interest now in the Arkansas Ozarks and his novels I find marvelous. I think he’s our great magical realist, like Marquez –

GORMAN: Michael _____?

CODRESCU: Harington –

GORMAN: Harington.

CODRESCU: – one “r”. His books are –

GORMAN: Not the Michael Harrington once described as America’s foremost socialist? The man who wrote about poverty?

CODRESCU: No, not the same person. This is Harington with one “r” and he lives in Fayetteville. He’s a man in his – I think his seventies. And he’s just a marvelous writer and his books are out of print, hard to find.

GORMAN: The other – thank you very much – the other Michael Harrington, as I say, was described as America’s foremost socialist, and William Buckley, who combines loathsome opinions with a quick wit, said that being described as America’s foremost socialist is like being the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas.

CODRESCU: Ha, ha, ha, ha!

GORMAN: I just finished a wonderful book by an English writer called Francis Wheen, w-h-e-e-n, who by the way – and here I’m cementing the reputation of myself and the Association – wrote a wonderful biography of Karl Marx. [Laughter]  Um – ah – pinko librarian praises commie author. Michael Harrington –

CODRESCU: But he had a life, though, I mean.  Ha, ha!

GORMAN: Sure he did, sure. Francis Wheen wrote a book which was published in Britain as How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World, and it’s been published in this country as Idiot Proof. And I thoroughly recommend it to anybody who’s worried about the tide of irrationalism and fundamentalism and all the kind of craziness that there is in the culture today.

GORMAN: Any other comments, catcalls, criticisms?

GORMAN: Well thank you, Andrei. This has been a wonderful session, I think.

[APPLAUSE]

CODRESCU: Thank you. Thank you very much.

GORMAN [to the audience]: Thank very much for coming. I want to remind you again that Andrei will be signing copies of his book in the foyer of this theatre as soon as we can make our way through the darkness and find our way there.

GORMAN [to Andrei]: Thank you so much.

CODRESCU: Thanks again. Thank you.

GORMAN: It was great. Very enjoyable.