U.S. Professor Vetoed for Traveling to Cuba  

New York city has decided to veto from its classrooms a professor from an institute of Manhattan who organized in 2007 a trip to Cuba with students, despite the banning of the center staff and municipal authorities.  
 
The municipal agency that supervises New York schools decided, as it can be read in a report disclosed today that Nathan Turner, a History professor who worked in the institute of high school Beacon, in the Upper West Side neighborhood, can never be hired again in the city.  
 
The authorities consider Turner the solely responsible that three years ago some students of that New York institute disobey federal laws that prohibited tourism to the Caribbean island from North American territory, when they carried out the trip organized by the teacher, despite the prohibition of the center.  
 
The report reliefs from all responsibility Beacon institute’s headmaster, Ruth Lacey, and makes Turner responsible for the trip, while putting in detail that the professor argued that he had to travel to Cuba because he was «communist and needed to see Fidel Castro once again before he died».  
 
Turner who gathered thirty students and negotiated the trip through a religious organization of New York had already managed before to travel to Cuba with students of Beacon in years 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2005, with the consent of the center and the Department of Education of the state of New York.  
 
The trips of studies between United States and Cuba are allowed for students in university age, but the Beacon institute was able to send in several occasions their students to Cuba, among those students in 2005 was the stepdaughter of the now New York governor, David Paterson, as publishes The New York Times.  
 
The governor, even, supported the 2007 trip for which Turner will be vetoed and always, as it assures the New York newspaper, made a call to the center to request the directive board authorized the trip of its students under Turner’s guidance who had in his office hung images of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.  
 
The report details that the headmaster of the center ignored the restrictions of the trips of studies to Cuba until 2007, and that that year she ignored that her students went to the Caribbean island until they returned, after having been detained a few hours by customs agents of the United States in Bahamas.    

Turner abandoned in 2008 his position in the Beacon institute and moved to New Orleans, where he runs a community project.    

Source: EFE 

Cubasi Translation Staff