Free Republic

“In the mid-1970s, California Congresswoman Karen Bass, who is now under consideration to be Joe Biden’s running mate, was an organizer for the Venceremos Brigade… An event blurb in an October 1975 issue of the communist Daily World newspaper describes Bass, then 22, as “leader of the Venceremos Brigade in southern California….As a ‘brigadista’ and then organizer for the Venceremos Brigades, Karen visited Cuba every 6 months.” (Tablet magazine, 7/28.) In that heady Age of Aquarius hundreds of starry-eyed college kids were volunteering to “help build Cuban Socialism” and “fight U.S. Imperialism,” mostly by joyfully cutting Cuban sugar cane and...

Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney — A Book to Watch! ### On June 16, the paperback edition of Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI by Peter Lance will be released by HarperCollins. This is happening despite a prominent U.S. Attorney’s best efforts to stop it. Since this book was first published in hardcover in 2006, Patrick Fitzgerald, US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago (the same Patrick Fitzgerald of the Valerie Plame investigation) has repeatedly attempted to have the publisher bury the book, and to prevent publication...

Ann Sparanese, a member of the governing Council of the American Library Association, has written a letter to the Voice criticizing my columns about Fidel Castro's prison sentences of 20 and more years for 75 Cuban dissenters, including 10 independent librarians. To her credit, she says, "I don't have the right to speak for the entire American Library Association." She is exercising her First Amendment right to speak for herself—the basis for the intellectual freedom, including the freedom to read, that until now the ALA has considered fundamental to people everywhere. At an upcoming midwinter meeting in San Diego, from...

Cuba's Jailed Librarians Get No Succor From the ALA By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY The Wall Street Journal / The Americas At the American Library Association annual meeting in Toronto this weekend there will be a Cuba program. But there won't be any panel debate about intellectual freedom in Fidel's tropical paradise. Efforts to include Cuba's independent librarians -- considered enemies of the Revolution -- on the ALA program have failed. That means that only employees of El Maximo Lider will be featured speakers. That should be downright riveting. The Toronto event might be a non-event if not for the fact...