Ex-political prisoner pens book about Cuba's reality

Posted on Wed, Dec. 13, 2006

EDUCATION
Ex-political prisoner pens book about Cuba's `reality'
Former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares wrote his own book
about life in Cuba as a counterpoint to two controversial children's
books in school libraries.
By TANIA deLUZURIAGA
tdeluzuriaga@MiamiHerald.com

Children loading guns, hospitals full of cockroaches and elderly people
who live mired in their own filth. This is the real Cuba, according to a
new children's book written by Armando Valladares.

The prominent poet and author who spent 22 years as one of Fidel
Castro's political prisoners was in Miami on Tuesday to introduce his
new book, Los Niños de Cuba.

''I don't think there's anyone more qualified than a world-renowned
author,'' state Rep. David Rivera said at a press conference in a Miami
restaurant. ``Parents should take note of this.''

Intended for children 7 years and older, Valladares' book is a response
to the Miami-Dade school controversy surrounding two children's books,
Vamos a Cuba and Cuban Kids. Critics say both contain omissions and
inaccuracies that paint an unreasonably mild portrait of life under Castro.

''This is the truth,'' parent Juan Amador Rodriguez said of Valladares'
book. ``This is the reason most Cuban exiles are here. This is the
reason my daughter was not born in Cuba.''

Rodriguez, a former political prisoner himself, initiated the
controversy about Vamos in April, after his daughter borrowed it from
the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School library.

Urged on by Rodriguez and others, the School Board voted to ban Vamos
from school libraries in June. A month later, a Miami federal judge
ordered the book back into the schools, saying the School Board ''abused
its discretion in a manner that violated the transcendent imperatives of
the First Amendment.'' The ruling has been appealed to the 11th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

Parents have asked that similar action be taken against Cuban Kids.

''The books in the school system are filled with lies,'' said
Valladares, referring to Vamos and Cuban Kids. ``I believe it is
criminal to lie to a child.''

Many in the Cuban community had objected to passages in Vamos and Cuban
Kids that compared life in Cuba to that in the United States.

Valladares attacked those generalizations head on.

Where Vamos a Cuba asserts that ''People in Cuba eat, work and go to
school like you do,'' Valladares said his book seeks to illustrate the
real differences between life here and life there.

''The lives of children in Cuba and the lives of children in the United
States are very different,'' the book says. ``They don't live, or work,
or study or eat the same.''

The book -- which is written in Spanish, but is expected to be available
in English soon -- explains that in Cuba food is rationed, that children
are sent far from their families each summer to work on farms and that
children have to join the military where they learn to shoot guns.

``In the United States you can criticize the government and the
president and nothing happens because there is freedom of expression. In
Cuba, you can't do anything without consequences and those that do can
be taken to jail because in Cuba there is no freedom of expression.''

The passages are accompanied by photographs of people standing in dirty
stores with empty shelves, children playing with broken toys and an
elderly man covered in his own excrement.

Valladares, whose best-known book, Against All Hope, chronicled his 22
years in a Cuban prison, where he survived years of solitary
confinement, routine beatings and watched his friends get tortured and
die. He now lives in Virginia.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan named him the U.S. representative to
the United Nations' Human Rights Commission with the rank of ambassador.

Valladares persuaded the U.N. to conduct an investigation of the
horrific conditions in Castro's jails, exposing to the world the
inhumanity he had witnessed.

Though Valladares disagrees with books such as Vamos, he said it was not
his intention to have his book appear in schools.

''It is up to the School Board to decide if it should be included in the
school system,'' he said. ``I want to provide a resource to parents and
children that educates them about the reality of life in Cuba.''

School Board members Marta Pérez and Renier Diaz de la Portilla, who
attended Tuesday's press conference, said they would like to see the
book appear in Miami-Dade schools.

Tuesday, Diaz de la Portilla sent a memo to School Board members
proposing that the book be purchased and distributed to all 206
elementary schools.

''I think every student should have access to this book,'' Diaz de la
Portilla said. ``I'm in favor of freedom of ideas and letting people
grapple with ideas.''

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/education/16226283.htm