Home
Introduction
Class
Activities
List
of Books & Materials
Burned in 2003
Links
to History and Practice
of
Book Burning
About
the Project
|
The
ten titles listed below were
among the thousands of books, pamphlets and audio tapes that
were ordered
incinerated by Cuban judges in 2003. The introduction
gives more background about the
circumstances
under which these books were torched. We chose these titles based on
the popularity
and
importance of the author of the work, not based on a count of how many
of each
title was
burned. The
titles are examples of the types of books that Fidel
Castro ordered
torched,
so that more Cubans would not read the "subversive" ideas in them.
Citizens
who lend such books to neighbors can be arrested for their "thought
crimes" and dumped into prison for bad reading habits.
Yet it is also
true
that most of these titles, in limited copies, are available somewhere
on a Cuban library shelf,
so the regime gets away with advancing the lie that all books are
treated equally, while
behind the guided tours they have ordered books burned. In this case,
the methods
of Castro
are different than the Nazi method of huge public gatherings with
bonfires
of Jewish and
un-German books. But the madness and meaning remain very much the same
-- or not?
Read the evidence and then decided: ¿Por Que-- why are these books burning in Cuba?
|
1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (By
far, most copies burned of this dangerous text)
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
2. Cuba's Repressive
Machinery:
Human Rights Forty Years After the Revolution,
by Human
Rights Watch (Human Rights Watch,
July 20,
1999).
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/cuba
3. View of Dawn
in the Tropics, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
Translated
from Spanish
by Suzanne Jill Levine. (London: Faber,
1988) First
U.K.
Edition.
4. Classic
Texts
of Carlos Franqui (Dominican Republic, 2001).
5. Martin Luther King: Contra Todos las
Exclusiones, by Vincent Rousell
(Bilbao [Spain]: Editorial Desclée De
Bouwer, 1995).
6. EI Viaje de Juan Pablo
II, or The Journey of John Paul II.
7. El Proyecto
Varela [The Varela Project] by
Alberto
Muller [and] Oswaldo Pay
(Miami, FL : Ediciones Universal,
2002 1st
ed.). Spanish.
8. Reporters
Without Borders Report
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=16771
9. The
Black Book of Communism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/COUBLA.html
10. The Power of
the Powerless:
Citizens Against the State in
Central-Eastern
Europe, by Vaclav
Havel (M. E. Sharpe; Paperback Reprint
edition,
June 1,
1990).
See Class
Reading & Analysis Activities For Each Title
Then answer the question "Porque
Incineration?"
|
