Few states have as personal a stake in the history of communism as Florida. South Florida is home to generations of exiles from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, people who fled communist governments and rebuilt their lives in Miami, Tampa, and Orlando. When Florida moved, in 2021 and 2022, to require honest teaching about communism in its schools, it was speaking from that experience. This chapter is about that decision: what Florida ordered its schools to teach, why Governor Ron DeSantis made it a priority, and why the fight over a classroom lesson became a national argument.
The video at the center of this chapter leads with Florida’s move, as part of a wider episode of America Uncovered that ranges across the week’s news. Its Florida story is simple: the state decided that students should learn the record of communism plainly, including its victims. Supporters say that is a matter of truth. Critics say it is a matter of politics. This chapter sets out the laws, the day of remembrance, and the debate around them.
A State Shaped by Exile
To understand Florida’s decision, it helps to understand Florida. The state’s Cuban American community dates to the years after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, when hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled to Florida. Later waves came from Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution, and from Venezuela as that country’s socialist government collapsed into crisis. In Miami, the story of communism is not an abstraction from a textbook. It is a family story, told at dinner tables by grandparents who lost homes, businesses, and relatives.
That lived memory gives Florida’s debate a different tone from the same debate in other states. When politicians in Tallahassee speak about the victims of communism, they are speaking to voters who count themselves among them, or whose parents did. DeSantis, who became governor in 2019, has made that connection central to his politics. He argues that Florida, as a haven for people who fled communism, has a duty to teach their story, and that American schools in general have failed to do so. Whether that argument is education or politics is the question his critics raise, but the community behind it is real.
The 2021 and 2022 Laws
The laws at the heart of this chapter came in two steps, in 2021 and 2022. Florida required that its civics and government courses teach students about the history and record of communism, including its failures and its human costs. The instruction was to be direct about the nature of communist regimes: that they suppressed dissent, restricted freedom, and caused widespread suffering. The point, supporters said, was to make sure that students could not graduate from a Florida school without knowing what communism had actually done, wherever it had held power.
The laws were part of a broader Florida program in civics education, which also expanded teaching about the founding documents and the principles of American government. DeSantis’s framing was consistent: Florida would teach patriotism rather than shame, and it would teach the dark side of America’s rivals rather than softening it. Critics replied that the state was writing a political lesson into the curriculum, and that history teaching should be left to historians rather than to governors. The dispute was not about whether communism’s record was grim, which few contested, but about who should decide how it is taught.
Victims of Communism Day
Alongside the curriculum laws, Florida established Victims of Communism Day, observed in schools on November 7. The date is chosen because November 7 marks the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, the event that brought the first communist government to power. On that day, Florida high school students are to be taught about the victims of communism: the people killed, imprisoned, and exiled under communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and elsewhere.
Supporters of the day say it serves the same purpose as other days of remembrance in the school year. It gives a name and a date to suffering that is often taught only in the abstract, and it honors the families in Florida who lived it. Opponents argue that a day set aside for one ideology’s victims invites political use, and that the state should be cautious about prescribing remembrance. Both sides agree, at least, that the day made Florida’s position unmistakable: in Florida’s schools, communism would be taught as a tragedy, not as a theory.
Standards, a Museum, and the Wider Fight
Florida also announced that it would develop new standards for teaching about communism, so that the instruction required by the laws would be consistent from one classroom to the next, and it supported plans for a museum dedicated to the victims of communism. The museum, like the day of remembrance, was intended to give the story a permanent home. Together, the standards and the museum turn a law into an institution: not a single lesson, but a lasting part of how Florida teaches its history.
The wider fight, meanwhile, is about the death tolls themselves. This book has spent seven parts counting the victims of communist regimes, from the Soviet Union to China, Cambodia, and Cuba, and arguing that those numbers have been softened or ignored in American classrooms. Florida’s answer is to put the numbers, and the stories behind them, directly into the curriculum. Its critics answer that the state’s real aim is to win a culture war, and that history should not be used as a weapon. The video presents Florida’s move as part of that larger American argument, and it is still running in classrooms, school boards, and statehouses today.
What Florida Decided, and What It Did Not
Florida’s laws do not settle the debate about communism in American education, but they do show where one state stands. A state shaped by exile has decided that its schools will teach communism’s record plainly, remember its victims on a set day, and build standards and a museum to carry that memory forward. Supporters call that honesty. Critics call it politics. The lesson for readers of this book is simpler: the story of communism is no longer only a story about distant countries. It is a story about American classrooms, about who decides what children learn, and about whether the victims this book has counted will be remembered or forgotten.
Florida takes on communism in its education system. Congress held a hearing on UFOs and heard from the US military what threat they pose to national security. The Supreme Court removed a cap on personal loans in political campaigns. And North Korea has arrived late to the Covid party, finally reporting a major outbreak in the country. Watch this episode of America Uncovered for that and more of this week’s headlines.