NEW YORK, Sept. 28, 2003 (Friends of Cuban Libraries) - On April 5, after a
one-day trial before the State Security Court in the city of Santiago, Cuban
dissident Julio Valdés was convicted of conspiring with U.S. diplomats to commit
"crimes against the national sovereignty and economy of Cuba" and sentenced
to 20 years in prison. One of the accusations made against Julio Valdés was the
founding of a "self-proclaimed Independent Library" to "ideologically subvert
the reader with the clear purpose, by means of inducing confusion, to recruit
persons for the counter-revolution..."  After sentencing the defendant to 20
years in prison, the judges also condemned Valdes' library materials as
"lacking in usefulness" and ordered them to be destroyed by fire.  Among the library
materials burned by order of the court were pamphlets on the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, Catholic periodicals, a report by Human Rights Watch
and a copy of "Letters From Burma" by Aung San Suu Khi.

Thanks to a new Florida State University website featuring the full text of
smuggled court documents, the alarming details on the Cuban regime's 21st
century version of "Fahrenheit 451" can be found in the "Recent News" section of
the Friends of Cuban Libraries website: (www.friendsofcubanlibraries.org).

Sincerely,

The Friends of Cuban Libraries
(WWW.FRIENDSOFCUBANLIBRARIES.ORG)