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Miami Appeals Court Hears Vamos CaseA three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments June 6 in a lawsuit against the Miami–Dade County School Board for ordering the removal of the children’s book Vamos a Cuba and its English-language counterpart A Visit to Cuba from elementary school libraries. The board’s attorney, Richard Ovelmen, told the judges that “The books are rife with factual omissions, misrepresentations, and inaccuracies that render them educationally unsuitable,” adding that they fail to mention that Cuba is a dictatorship, the New York Times reported June 7.However, ACLU of Florida Executive Director Howard Simon countered, “There’s a difference between a book not being complete and a book being inaccurate. All a publicly elected body has to do to ban a book is utter the word inaccurate? If that’s the case, every library administrator and library association in the country should be worried.” U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold upheld July 24, 2006, the ACLU of Florida’s request for an injunction against the school board’s decision on First Amendment grounds, but the board appealed the case, arguing that the book inaccurately portrayed life in Cuba. The 2001 picture book by Alta Schreier sports a cover that shows smiling children wearing the uniforms of Cuba’s communist youth group, and one page claims that Cuban children “eat, work, and go to school like you do.” Circuit Judge Ed Carnes questioned the statement, saying “That’s simply not true.” Senior District Court Judge Donald E. Walter compared the book to a hypothetical one about Adolf Hitler that touted the invention of the Volkswagen but failed to mention the Holocaust. JoNel Newman, an attorney for the ACLU, told the panel that Vamos a Cuba does not include political information, the June 7 Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported. “The political reality in Cuba is not part of what this book is about,” she said. “Books for 4- to 7-year-olds can’t tell everything.” Will Weissert, a Havana correspondent for the Associated Press, wrote in a May 16 column that appeared in the Olympia (Wash.) Olympian that posters on the walls of the Cuban National Library show a picture of the book’s cover with the word “censored” across it. “In Miami, Cuban children’s smiles bother them,” a caption explains. The court is expected to take several weeks to make its ruling. Posted June 8, 2007. |
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