Vol. 73/No. 7      February 23, 2009

The book—Vamos a Cuba—was available in the public school libraries in English and Spanish until the school board voted 6-3 to remove the book in 2006. The book had been available in some school libraries as extracurricular reading for children in kindergarten through the second grade. Two academic advisory committees and then-superintendent Rudy Crew called for keeping the book in the school system’s libraries.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said the ACLU would challenge the latest ruling. “We’re going to take further action to prevent the shelves of the Miami-Dade school library from being scrubbed clean of viewpoints some people in the school find objectionable… . However much they try to evade the facts and bend the law into a pretzel, censorship is censorship is censorship,” Simon told the Miami Herald.

Andrés Gómez, a leader of the Alianza Martiana, a coalition of groups in Miami that oppose Washington’s embargo against Cuba, said, “What came to my mind when I read about it was that it’s the same court that found no problem with the trial of the Cuban Five taking place in Miami. It doesn’t surprise me that they would rule the way they have on the book. The school board is made up of persons who have extreme right-wing views. They violate the Constitution and the circuit court agrees with them.”

The Cuban Five, who were monitoring activities of groups planning attacks on Cuba, were convicted in 2001 of frame-up charges of conspiracy to commit espionage and in the case of one of them, conspiracy to commit murder, in a trial held in Miami. One of the grounds attorneys for the five used to challenge the constitutionality of the trial was that their request to change the venue from Miami, where anti-Cuba rightists created an intimidating atmosphere, was denied.

Omari Musa, Socialist Workers candidate for mayor of Miami, told the Militant, “My campaign condemns the federal court decision that allows the school board to impose thought control on students in the district and to rob them of the opportunity to read anything positive about the Cuban Revolution. We call on working people to oppose the censorship and demand that Vamos a Cuba be put back on school library shelves.”

When the book was first banned, Cuban librarians protested the action. “It’s outrageous the Miami school libraries would prohibit the presence of Vamos a Cuba because it shows the truth about how our children live,” librarian Margarita Bellas Vilarino told Juventud Rebelde, a Cuban daily published by the Union of Young Communists.

The book’s front cover portrays smiling Cuban children dressed in school uniforms.

The book is part of a series published by Heinemann Library, a division of Harcourt Education. It is geared to five- to seven-year-old students. It is one in a 24-part series depicting life for children in countries like Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, England, Greece, Israel, Japan, and Vietnam. The covers of most of these books are similarly adorned with pictures of smiling children. The school board voted to remove the entire series.  
 
 
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