Their oppressor is a 32-page book from the Vamos series, which had been in Miami-Dade public school libraries for five years before anyone complained. During that time, no one had questioned why Vamos a Colombia fails to mention decades of kidnappings by leftist guerrillas or why Vamos a China omits any mention of the millions who starved during Mao's Great Leap Forward. But after one parent's initial complaint, critics of Vamos a Cuba came out of the woodwork. The book's reference to July 26 as a dance-happy "carnaval" was off-base, critics said, because under Castro, the day had become little more than a joyless, speech-filled commemoration of the revolution. Rock paintings described in the book as 1000 years old actually dated to the Sixties. And as for chicken and rice being the favorite dish in Cuba: How are you going to eat chicken and rice if there's a shortage of both?[...] Amador was hardly the first parent to object to a book his child brought home from school. Works such as J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye are frequently challenged. The past few months alone have seen school district challenges to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in California and Calvin and Hobbes, a cartoon collection by Bill Watterson, in Illinois. (On April 4, the day Amador filed his complaint, Miami's national book-reading campaign, the Big Read, opened; the book chosen for mass consumption was Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, the story of a future totalitarian state where books are banned and burned by the government.)
Removing a book altogether is another story, said Deborah Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom. Federal courts have upheld children's rights to access books, except when they are deemed to contain 'gross inaccuracies or age-inappropriate subject matter or vocabulary,' Stone said. But removal of books is not unheard of: Since 1993, 257 books have been temporarily or permanently banned from school libraries, while 35 have been banned from public libraries since 1995.
Miami New Times :: Commie Book Ban
(And, as a side note, who let a title like "Commie Book Ban" go to press?)
