Opening a new world for research on the Americas
Campus, Cuban librarians celebrate historic pact

By Kathleen Maclay and Cathy Cockrell, Public Affairs

20 SEPTEMBER 00 | Bold revolutionary political posters flanked the stately oil portraits of Doe Library's Morrison Room last week as campus librarians and their colleagues from the Cuban National Library celebrated a trailblazing new pact.

The September 13 program honored their plan for a unique exchange of publications and archival materials, reinvigorating scholarly dialogue stymied by the four-decade-old U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba.

The director of Jose Martí National Library of Cuba, Eliades Acosta, headed the Cuban delegation and offered comments on the 1898 Spanish-American War in Cuba, one of the historical roots of estrangement between the two nations of the Americas.

"Let's make the story of these events a way of bringing us together," Acosta said. "I am absolutely convinced that this is the real destiny of our peoples."

Under the pact, Cuba's National Library will provide the campus with free, duplicate copies of books, sheet music and journals.

In return, Berkeley will catalog and store duplicates of the materials, making them available via online catalogues and interlibrary loans to researchers across the country. It would also establish and manage a fund to help buy, for the national library, books on Cuba published in the United States. (Under the embargo, Cuba has been prohibited from buying directly from U.S. publishers any books that relate to Cuban history, culture and development.)

The hope is also to digitize a post-revolutionary poster collection and fold it into the collection of The Bancroft Library.

"These magnificent Cuban posters draw attention to these barriers (between the U.S. and Cuba)," interim director of the Library, Tom Leonard, said of the Cuban posters - on such topics as "the third anniversary of Cuban-African friendship" and the "Bertolt Brecht Political Theater Group" - that served as backdrop to the event. "There should be no barriers between scholars," Leonard said.

A public exhibit of Cuban materials, on display till October 15 is outside Morrison Library, offers a glimpse of the kinds of materials that Doe would acquire under the new agreement.

Its 17 display cases include handmade books composed on scraps of brown grocery bags during periods of scarcity in Cuba; sheet music of the Cuban national anthem and contemporary Cuban songs; works of poetry and prose, history, literary criticism, art and cinema; books by and about the great Cuban hero Jose Martí, and archival materials on Cuba's tobacco, rum and sugar industries.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury ruled in May that the exchange would be exempt from the long-time trade embargo. Since then, the two sides have been hammering out details of the agreement.

Carlos Delgado, librarian for Latin American collections at Doe, said potential contributions to scholarship and international relations are immense.

"This project, as it contributes to the building of library research collections, will have a long-term impact on Cuban studies in the U.S.," he said. "I think it's a great opportunity not only for Berkeley, but for Cuban or Caribbean scholars throughout the United States."

The campus's immediate goal would be to improve access to Cuban materials that for many years have been difficult to obtain, and to thereby stimulate research and enhance understanding of Cuba, Delgado said.

The idea for the Berkeley-Cuba exchange, said Delgado, grew out of conversations between himself and Lincoln Cushing, a graduate student in the School of Information Management and Systems, who is digitizing a large personal collection of post-revolution Cuban posters. (See www.sims.berkeley. edu/~lcush/CubaGen.html.)

Under the new exchange agreement, The Bancroft Library hopes to digitize Cuban poster images and make them available for research, as opposed to commercial use, over the Internet.

Mass poster art is a natural addition to the Library's Cuba archive, as it has served as a way for the Cuban government to reach its 11 million people, urging support for joining the sugar harvest or working in the sugar mills, political causes and cultural programs.

Links:

The digitized collection to date can be seen at www.sims.berkeley.edu/~lcush/CubaGen.html