Reaching for the Sun: Kids in Cuba

By Trish Marx

This is a book about differences and similarities. Readers will learn, as the kids in the book learned, that people who speak different languages, or live a different way of life, still share the most important qualities. Kids all over the world have similar hopes, dreams, and feelings. When a group of kids left Los Angeles, California, for a trip to Cuba, everyone knew they were going someplace different. None of them knew too much about Cuba, or anything at all about the kids they were spending the summer with. What they discovered--about Cuba, the Cuban kids, and about themselves--is that there are things we have in common that will help us all get along, if we only open our eyes and hearts.

• Format: Library Binding
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0761322612
• ISBN13: 9780761322610
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Millbrook Press
• Length: 48 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 10.1" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 10 to 13 years
• Grade Range: Grades 5 to 8

Customer Reviews

Kids create communication, Christian compassion, community, caring and sharing, peace through unders

How often we learn children overcome and transcend the bitter barriers and boundaries we carefully and violently and earnestly erect between one another. In the early days of PSA's (Public Service Announcements) we often heard sung softly "You have to be taught to hate and kill you have to be carefully taught . . ." Indeed the documentary The Ground Truth reveals how that teaching takes place. Since then of course PSA's have reduced to grim aggressively thin people telling us the myriad means and manners in which we men are mean. The more you know . . . Here in this book we see children free, before the impositions of tightened strictures against freedom of association, communication, travel, etc., enforced by the current dynastic regime, to share and to play together. We see hope. We see peace among peoples, a few years before the creation of cruel and unusual concentration camps in their own bay captured and controlled by our military. This is the bitter fruit of the 2000 coup d'etat which replaced our president elect (cf. The Assault on Reason) with a military regime which sends war to build peace, as if a tank can cultivate a corn field and claymore mines level roads. Instead we live irrevocably more apart than ever. As the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. forewarned, we die apart as fools. For instance, see his Strength to Love. We see the possibilities of peace which once were. We weep for the loss of solidarity and wonder at its possibility of recovering and reconciliation. We see how a Child shall lead us, as Isaiah promised and prophesized, to peace and justice, communication and Love. Children, untouched as they are by the carefully learned prejudices which separate us, are the solution to the nightmare of history from which we struggle to awaken, or not. Of such are the Kingdom of Heaven, not of this world. Read this and weep, and work for peace. Give the children hope, and peace.