"INDEPENDENT" LIBRARIANS WITH CIA FINANCING: Now Robert Kent will have to Explain his Ties with the Swindler Calzón

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD
August 1, 2008
www.granma.cu

ROBERT Kent, owner of the Friends of Cuban Libraries organization, plans to be in Quebec City for the World Library and Information Congress, to continue his slandering of Cuba.

This time, however, this active collaborator of the CIA has a serious problem: his old friend Frank Calzón, owner of the Center for a Free Cuba — which funds Kent’s activities — is being investigated by the U.S. Congress for massively defrauding the so-called U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The librarians’ congress, organized by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), opens on August 10 in the Canadian city, with the participation of more than 4,000 librarians from all over the world.

For about a decade now, Kent has dedicated himself to the mission that Calzón personally gave him: to denigrate legitimate Cuban librarians, part of the national library system, by encouraging a small network of Cuban pseudo-"librarians" created by the United States Interests Section (USIS) in Havana, using some of its paid informants.

The plan is part of the USAID strategy under its Cuba Program, to destabilize the Cuban Revolution with the help of tens of millions of dollars.

In the context of this operation, Calzón has spent tens of thousands of dollars, but recent investigations by the General Accountability Office (GAO) of the U.S. Congress have revealed gaping financial holes among the supposed "operations" carried out by his staff of mercenaries in Cuba.

The GAO’s revelations of Calzón and other criminals who make their living as anti-Cubans were such that, a few months ago, the crisis in the USAID led to the departure of corrupt official Adolfo Franco, who for years had been handing out millions of dollars to the benefit of Cuban-American mafia capos.

Franco was given refuge in the campaign organization of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who is — (what a coincidence!) — also head of the International Republican Institute, a beneficiary of USAID’s generosity.

In April, Calzón himself admitted that Felipe Sixto, his right-hand man for years at the Center for a Free Cuba, had stolen half a million dollars over the course of his three years in this CIA department.

Recently, U.S. Congressman Howard Berman, a Democrat from California who is chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, became alarmed by the GAO’s revelations and ordered the freezing of funds for the Center for a Free Cuba "as a response to the $500,000 embezzlement," according to the U.S. media.

In taking that step, the U.S. politicians admitted that for years, the Cuban-American mafia has been scandalously diverting money meant for the pro-annexation campaign that the U.S. government is trying to wage against Cuba.

The U.S. Congress subsequently froze the entire $45 million allocated in 2008 for USAID’s Cuba Program… only to later accept commitments from the White House, the State Department and USAID to thoroughly investigate the massive system of diversion of federal funds, promoted for decades by the Cuban-American Congress members Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Díaz-Balart brothers, who are affiliated with the mafia in Miami.

However, given its magnitude, the Calzón subsidy has remained frozen.

As of now, it is not known to what extent Kent was caught red-handed, but it is likely that the New Yorker will soon have to appear in a hearing to justify every cent that was spent over the last 10 years on his anti-Cuban adventures, which have taken him around the world, in line with the wishes of his dear friend Calzón.

A LIBRARIAN WITH A RADIO TRANSMITTER AND GPS WATCH

In February of 1999, Cuban "dissident" Aleida Godínez received a visit from Kent, who introduced himself under a false name. He said he was a New York librarian, and that he had come on behalf of Calzón, known as a veteran CIA agent.

Kent’s visit had two objectives: to subcontract Godínez for Calzón, so that she could investigate sensitive issues of the Cuban economy, and to get her to photograph the residence of the Carlos Lage Dávila, vice president of the Council of State. Clearly, an espionage operation.

Kent did not have any books with him. He arrived with a camera, a shortwave radio, a transmitter and 10-band receiver, a Casio-brand watch with a GPS and lots of cash.

The New Yorker was detained as he was leaving the country and expelled for espionage.

This low-grade James Bond did not realize that Aleida Godínez was working for Cuban State Security, as Agent "Vilma."

MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR PROPAGANDA MACHINE

The United States annually spends tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to attack Cuba.

Kent’s organization, the so-called Friends of Cuban Libraries, is a "one-man committee," formed in line with the plans of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The Bush government, which has kept his country mired in a bloody war in Iraq, and which authorized torture in the Guantánamo concentration camp, and which abandoned its own African-American citizens in New Orleans, is the same government that is attempting to teach Cuba about human rights with its multimillion-dollar propaganda machine.

At a previous world librarians’ congress in Oslo, Norway, Robert Kent’s offensive against Cuba turned into a spectacular defeat. Abandoned by his newest recruits from Eastern Europe, he was kept off the stage.

At the congress that followed, in Seoul, South Korea, Kent’s plans backfired. He was able to force a resolution onto the floor by maneuvering, but it was never presented for a vote because it was so off, and the event served to significantly strengthen Cuba’s real librarians’ relations with other nations.

A few weeks later, the Bush government, in another useless attempt to slander Cuba, presented a speaker at a U.S. librarians’ congress: Madeleine Albright — the featherless hawk from the Clinton era, plucked out of the garbage bin for the dirty war against Cuba.

At the international congress in Quebec, Kent will show up with his usual wrinkled pants and inseparable green canvas bag to do his secret agent work in the halls of Congress, as part of the disinformation campaign led by Bush’s State Department. It is likely that he will be accompanied by one of the Cubans on the State Department payroll, these being generally associated with the most violent groups tolerated by Bush’s legal apparatus in south Florida.

He will seek the support of individuals like the former "dissidents" of Eastern Europe who were recruited for being – without exception – linked to U.S. spy services, and groups like the so-called "non-governmental organization" Reporters Sans Frontières, led by French mercenary Robert Ménard, who had admitted — he had no choice — to receiving financing from none other than Frank Calzón’s Center for a Free Cuba.

However, in the historic city that was the cradle of New France, he is awaited by Cuba solidarity activists and numerous librarians who are friends of the island, all of whom are tired of hearing the Kent’s worn old rhetoric, repeated on previous occasions and copied from the routine scripts of the U.S. extreme-right wing.

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/agosto/vier1/31bibliotecarios.html