Thursday, June 22, 2006

MIAMI, USA (Reuters): The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Miami's public school system on Wednesday, saying its ban on a children's book about travel to Cuba was unconstitutional.

The Miami-Dade County School Board voted to order the removal of the book, "Vamos a Cuba" and its English-language version "A Visit to Cuba," from school libraries last week after a parent complained that it painted an overly favorable picture of life in the Communist-ruled island nation.

The ban has triggered what ACLU officials described at a news conference on Wednesday as the first major legal battle over book censorship by a U.S. public school system since 1982.

Outlining the group's lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said the book ban violated the First Amendment and openly defied a U.S. law prohibiting censorship.

He also suggested that "Vamos a Cuba" had only stirred controversy because of pressure from Miami's politically powerful Cuban exile community.

The complaint against the book, filed in April, came from a self-described former political prisoner in Cuba.

"It's another unfortunate self-inflicted black eye on this community. We can appreciate that the book might be found to be offensive by some parents, but censorship is a cure that is worse than the disease," Simon said.

"The fight for freedom in Cuba cannot be a fight against the First Amendment in Miami," he added.

The book is part of a series of books that covers a total of 20 countries in English and four in Spanish.

They are intended for readers between 5 and 7 years old and are meant to provide basic information about what life is like for children beyond their borders.

The Miami-Dade School Board received no complaints about any of the books except the one on Cuba but it voted to remove all 24 of them from library shelves nonetheless.

Simon said the move was especially alarming because the books were all optional library reading material and not required textbooks used in the classroom.

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