GOODY TWO SHOES: US Librarians Condemn Book Banning In The US, But Not In Cuba

 

After receiving a complaint in April from a parent who said he had been a political prisoner in Cuba, the Miami-Dade County school board moved to ban “Vamos a Cuba” (“A Visit to Cuba”), a book for children ages 5 to 7 depicting “images of smiling children wearing uniforms of Cuba's communist youth group.” Cuban librarians cried “censorship,” the Associated Press reports:

“It's outrageous the Miami school libraries would prohibit the presence of the book ‘Vamos a Cuba’ because it shows the truth about how our children live,” librarian Margarita Bellas Vilarino told the state newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

Bellas, of the Cuban Association of Librarians, and Abel Ponce, of the Jose Marti National Library in Havana, told Juventud Rebelde that government-run libraries island-wide were protesting the Florida book ban. …

 

According to Reuters, which depicts the conflict  between Cuban exiles and civil libertarians as being over “A children's book that fails to paint a harsh picture of communist Cuba”:

Critics say the book's pictures of smiling Cuban children and bland generalities … distort the harsh realities of food rationing, one-party political rule and other facets of life under a brutal communist dictatorship.

 

“The book teaches our kids that Cuba is a paradise,” said Julio Cabarga, president of the exile group Cuban Patriotic Council. “… we are against the pack of lies, half-truths and deceit that this book is projecting to our kids and our grandkids.”

 

Naturally, the ACLU sued on the grounds that the ban violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But one man’s free speech is another’s propaganda:

Frank Bolanos, the school board member who led the fight to ban [the book] said the case is not about free speech, vowing he would defend the right of author Alta Schreier to write the book, of the publisher to print it and of a citizen to buy it.

 

“But we cannot and must not use taxpayer dollars to buy communist propaganda,” he said.

 

Lawyers for the ACLU and the School Board argued their cases before US District Judge Alan S. Gold court on July 21. In his closing statement, Richard Ovelmen, the lead attorney for the School Board, noted the irony of the ACLU, “which seeks to defend individual rights in the United States” arguing “on behalf of a book that ignores the oppression of the Cuban people.”

 

First Amendment activist Nat Hentoff couldn’t have put it better himself. Among the numerous articles he’s written about political oppression in Cuba, several deal specifically with how the government controls what books libraries may stock on their shelves – and what happens to librarians who disobey the diktat:

[I]n a secret trial [librarians Elio Enrique Chavez and Luis Elio de la Paz] were sentenced to prison on a charge of dangerousness (peligrosidad). …


[A] letter smuggled out of their prison by librarians Chavez and de la Paz [a]s reported on the Web site www.friendsofcubanlibraries.org:

“The police told the defendants that their prison terms would be publicized as a government work/study program rather than a form of punishment,” According to the prisoners,” (The colonel said) it would be made known that we are not prisoners, that it (i.e., their detainment) was for a work/study program of the Revolution; we told him we did not agree, that we weren't going to work or study but that they were sentencing us for our political position. ... We're going to serve our sentence behind bars.”

 

In another article, Hentoff relates a conversation with fellow-free speech warrior Ray Bradbury, author of “Fahrenheit 451,” about Cuba’s “independent librarians” who lend unapproved books from their own personal collections to anyone who wants to read them, and who suffer harsh punishment when caught:

We were talking about Fidel Castro's recurring crackdowns on those remarkably courageous Cubans who keep working to bring democracy to that grim island where dissenters, including independent librarians, are locked in cages, often for 20 or more years. Bradbury knew about the crackdowns, but until I told him, was not aware of Castro's kangaroo courts (while sentencing the "subversives") often ordering the burning of the independent libraries they raid, just like in “451.”

 

According to Hentoff, the American Library Association, which entered the Miami case on behalf of the ACLU, has thus far remained silent on the plight of their Cuban counterparts.

 

Update:

 

U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold barred the Miami-Dade County School District from removing children's book “Vamos a Cuba” from school libraries until the case goes to trial. The school system has until the end of the day to put the controversial children’s book back on the shelves. One factor in the judge's decision was that schoolchildren were not required to read the book.


Posted by The Stiletto at July 24, 2006
Categories: Goody Two Shoes
 

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