Author Blasts Judge for Ordering Pro-Cuba Library Book Back On Shelves
by Jim Brown
July 31, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Cuban-American columnist and historian is criticizing a judge's decision to have a controversial travel book on Cuba put back on school library shelves in Miami, Florida. The Miami-Dade County School Board had voted to pull the book, A Visit to Cuba, from the shelves after a parent complained that the book made life on the communist island sound too rosy. A federal judge, however, is siding with the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, saying the case goes "to the heart" of a free-speech issue. His order keeps the book in school libraries until trial. (See earlier article)
Humberto Fontova, author of the book Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant (Regnery, 2005), says he wonders if the judge is aware that 267 books have been removed from schools because of parental complaints in the last decade. "These books involve, by the way, titles such as Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and of course, the famous ones like Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate," he notes. "So, in other words, this happens all the time."
There are plenty of precedents for various groups demanding the removal of offensive literature and getting schools to comply with their wishes, Fontova points out. "But for some reason," he complains, "those vicious, fiendish, right-wing Cuban Americans are not allowed to do the same thing."
The conservative writer-historian notes that the parent who initially brought the complaint about A Visit to Cuba is someone who has been in a position to know that the book does not present a realistic picture of life in the oppressive communist nation. This father, he says, is a former political prisoner who was tortured by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and later escaped on a raft to the United States.
"He is now living the American dream, runs his own profitable business in Miami-Dade, sends his kids to public school," Fontova explains. "But do you know what he said? He said, 'Well, now this just means I will take my children out of the school. If they have to read Castroite propaganda -- the same thing I had to read in a Stalinist country -- if they're being forced to read it in this country, that's it.'"
That parent's children are going to a private school now, which is "nice," Fontova says. "It's nice to have that option." But he feels the federal judge over this case has ignored the feelings of those concerned parents who cannot so easily afford to move their children to another school.
Fontova is currently writing a book that he says will "set the record straight" about an upcoming Hollywood movie that glamorizes the life of Marxist rebel Che Guevara. The author describes Guevara as a cold-blooded killer and a "plodding bureaucrat," who was "Stalinist to the core" and excelled only in the "mass murder" of defenseless men.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
