Their concern is for the 14 self-styled librarians, many of them journalists or writers, who open their private collections to the public, and who were jailed with 64 others in March for treason, while the world was preoccupied with Iraq.

and

Without library degrees or state sponsorship, they have had difficulty pleading their case outside Cuba.

and

The ALA also has a draft resolution urging the Cuban government "to respect the rights of all individuals to freedom of expression and access to information and to eliminate policies that infringe on those rights."

Emphasis mine.

Is it too much to expect that a professional organization might have to document the credentials of the people for whom they use third-party grant moneys to bring to an international conference?

Perhaps if this group had approached the ALA/CLA with the offer to present a workshop on information access under totalitarian regimes instead of trying to alter the conference agenda to suit themselves by going to the press, they might have gotten somewhere.

There's nothing to prevent them from paying the money and going to the conference. But maybe what they really want is free tickets.