The committee was formed to review the challenge of area resident Dalila Rodriguez, even though her children do not attend the school, according to the August 26 Miami Herald. Rodriguez objected to photos in the book of a child with a rifle and children saluting the Cuban flag with the caption, “We will be like Che!” “It’s not that we want the book to be burned,” she told the Herald. “If you want it in Barnes and Noble and somebody wants to buy it, fine. But don’t make it available to an 8- or 9-year-old child.”
Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, characterized the book’s removal as “a glimpse of what the future is going to be like unless the courts put a stop to this growing book-banning cancer in Miami–Dade County,” referring to the July injunction his organization won against A Visit to Cuba and 23 other titles in the same series getting pulled off district library shelves pending a hearing this fall. The board, whose chair Agustín Barrera is up for reelection September 5 against adamant anti–Visit to Cuba candidate Manny Anon, voted August 22 to appeal the injunction even though no permanent ruling has yet been made in the case.
Posted September 1, 2006.