Dear Florida parents destroying education,
I hope your children are reading this behind your back, because you’re failing them.
Not a week goes by without the unfurling of another outrageously repressive stunt by Gov. DeSantis and Florida’s Department of Education. And I can’t help but be transported by the chicanery to two of my many lives: childhood in Cuba and motherhood in Miami.
Neither was for wimps. But this Republican era in Florida is downright scary.
The latest act of infamy is the Republican takeover of small, liberal arts New College of Florida in Sarasota, a hot spot of moms hellbent on censoring our cultural consumption.
The formula of stacking the Board of Trustees with followers of the GOP agenda to peddle right-wing ideology is a redo of the coup d’etat consolidated in 2019 at Miami Dade College, the nation’s largest higher-learning institution. It features that same cast of leading characters — DeSantis and his education commissioner, Manny Díaz Jr.
Fast-forward to 2023, and we have moms storming school board meetings, financing the political campaigns of censoring politicians, declaring objectionable — and successfully banning from schools — books like “The Bluest Eye” by Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. It’s the story of a sweet Black girl searching for her place in the world.
Millions of kids in Cuba are, like I was, still forbidden access to certain kinds of books. Now Florida’s 3 million are too.
Let that sink in.
DeSantis exerting political control on education and punishing anyone who disagrees with him, including mega-corporation Disney, ought to send shivers down the spine of any Miamian who has fled authoritarian regimes.
But, on the contrary, Florida parents — including Cubans and Latin Americans who should know better — are thrilled with censorship.
Reminds me of my school in Matanzas, taken over by one man with one ideology. He renamed it Escuela 26 de Julio after his guerrilla movement.
Like DeSantis, Fidel Castro, too, claimed liberation was taking place.
But, Moms for Liberty, you don’t fool me. You’re aiding and abetting government intrusion in education that’s all too similar to what I experienced in the communist regime.
You’re not brave. You’re wimps who run on the fuel of bullies — fear — to create hostile environments for teachers and administrators. You demand sanitized, Christian-only classrooms and bans on books that help some kids feel less alone.
As DeSantis’ foot soldiers, you’re hijacking education from kindergarten to the college campus.
By prohibiting books about minorities and discussions about gender identity, what parents like you do is abdicate your chief responsibility: parenting your own children — and leaving me, not the state, to parent mine.
A lot of us in South Florida have suffered useful fools like you before.
When word spread in early 1960s Havana that Castro’s reforms would include parents handing over to the new government their “patria potestad” — the right to make decisions for their children — a secret exodus of Cuban children, traveling alone, followed.
It’s ironic that DeSantis’ education commissioner — the 49-year-old, Hialeah-born son of Cuban exiles — is leading the charge to install the type of ideological government trespass our parents fled.
It’s particularly disgusting that, on Díaz Jr.’s watch, the censors at Duval County schools are able to get away with banning the artful biography of a Cuban music icon: “Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa,” by Veronica Chambers and Julie Maren. And also the life story of a Puerto Rican baseball great after whom a Miami park is named: “Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” by Jonah Winter and Raúl Colón.
Many of the 176 books Duval banned, many award-winning titles, have one feature in common: They portray the lives, struggles and triumphs of minority role models or minority children.
Most are people of color.
It’s not surprising to see prejudice shamelessly displayed in a city like Jacksonville, still hanging on to some of its offensive Confederate monuments. This is what happens when those in charge give bigotry wings.
Spineless Díaz Jr. and DeSantis should be held accountable — and so should the parents pushing for this debacle.
Parents such as yourselves are handing over responsibility of parenting your children to the state.
But if you haven’t established the open communication you’ll need to get you through the teen years by age 8 or so, I can tell you from experience that no executive order by DeSantis, no mandate by Diaz Jr. — and no law passed by the Legislature — will facilitate parenting for you.
You can’t hide the complex parts of life from your kid forever. All you’re doing is playing a role in dismantling our democracy. And once lost, it will take lifetimes to restore.
DeSantis is doing all he can to weaken ours. As I write this, he’s leading a discussion about how to make it easier to sue media companies — exactly what Castro did to consolidate power: destroy the free press.
On my writing desk, below my first journalism award — Hialeah High School, 1977 — and next to portraits of my exiled parents, sits my most inspirational refrigerator magnet. It’s the caricature of a woman in sports gear, holding up baby-blue boxing gloves, hair all over the place — and a big smile on her face.
“Motherhood is not for wimps,” she declares.
Neither is education — or journalism — in the time of Ron DeSantis.
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