The United States and Cuba are on the road to re-establishing diplomatic and cultural ties after a half-century of hostilities. President Barack Obama will visit the island nation Sunday, demonstrating the power of diplomacy and asserting democratic values.
The United States and Cuba are on the road to re-establishing diplomatic and cultural ties after a half-century of hostilities. President Barack Obama will visit the island nation Sunday, demonstrating the power of diplomacy and asserting democratic values.
But the American Booksellers Association and other big players in the publishing industry are concerned he is neglecting a major piece of business. While many cultural links between Cuba and the United States have been restored, book selling has not. Consequently, the industry petitioned the president to bring that to an end.
It would take an act of Congress to lift the trade embargo, and that’s not likely to happen while Obama is in office. But publishers think the president can lift the ban affecting books and educational materials through his authority over cultural exchange.
Publishers Weekly, the largest trade publication for the industry, is running a petition in its current edition asserting the embargo is “harmful to book culture and runs counter to American ideals of free expression.” It says books are “catalysts for greater cross-cultural understanding,” regardless of a person’s politics.
While the Republican leadership that controls Congress is opposed to lifting the trade embargo, they should be willing to see more American books enter the communist-ruled country. The sooner ordinary Cubans are exposed to democratic ideals through reading, the more backward the Castro regime will appear.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette