The True Cuba Book Launches Kickstarter Campaign

Award winning Miami Visual Artist/Photographer Jonathan Brooks launches The True Cuba book project on the crowd funding platform Kickstarter website.

"The true oppression of Cuba is disguised behind many masks," says Brooks. "Many propel the distorted facts knowingly and unknowingly."

The True Cuba is a hot topic book about life on the island, written without political agendas or hidden messages. A superior replacement for the controversial children's book Vamos a Cuba, that was pulled from the Public Library shelves by the Miami-Dade County School board in 2006 and whose legal battle concerning the banning of the inaccurate portrayal of Cuba ended on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2009.

Brooks' work has recently been shown locally as a finalist in the b2 Hotel's Capturing Miami competition in Downtown Miami and Art Takes Miami at Scope during Art Basel on Miami Beach. He was just featured in the December 2013 issues of HD Video Pro and Digital Photo Pro magazine's as a top ten finalist in their Emerging Pro Film and Motion competition sponsored by RED cameras, Zeiss Lenses, and Adobe for his first short film 5 SKULLS.

His art and writing can also be found in his Jonathan Brooks Visual Arts shop at JonathanBrooksPhoto.Etsy.com. Through his own JDB ebooks he has PDF file ebooks available in his Etsy shop.

Brooks' The True Cuba book project launches the fourth week in January and he has a 30 day deadline to reach his funding goal. Backer rewards are offered for different tiers of pledges and there is an option for individual or corporate sponsorship of the project. Pre-orders of the book on the site also help him towards the backing. Pledge levels start at $1.

About Jonathan Brooks:
Jonathan Brooks is an award winning photographer, whose work has been exhibited in Art Basel Miami, New York City, Amsterdam, and the United Kingdom. His studies in graphic design and architecture, and extensive backgrounds in the fashion industry and music industry have helped to influence his work.

Brooks graduated magna cum laude with a BS degree from the University of Miami with a Communications Double Major (Advertising and Fine Arts: Photography) and a minor in Marketing.

He is a rare Miami native and is bilingual, who recently launched Teach&Greet Bilingual Greeting Cards on CardGnome.com. He also writes and photographs reviews for GreatFoodList.com and is the shop owner of Jonathan Brooks Visual Arts on Etsy.com. Brooks just finished his first short film 5 SKULLS, that can be found on vimeo and youtube.

About Kickstarter
Kickstarter helps people fund creative projects. Kickstarter is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. Kickstarter has been featured in NPR, CNN, The New York Times, Time, BBC, and Wired. Since their launch in April 2009, $200 million has been pledged to projects, 2 million people have backed a project, and 20,000 projects have been successfully funded.

About Vamos a Cuba (Let's Go to Cuba)
Vamos a Cuba (Let's Go to Cuba) is a controversial children's book about Cuba. Critics say that the book doesn't accurately represent life in the communist state. When Miami-Dade Public Schools attempted to remove the book from the public school's library system the ACLU filed a lawsuit stating that it was a First Amendment violation. A federal appeals court ruled that the School Board did not violate the Constitution in 2006 and removed the controversial children's book from the public schools' library system.

In a 2-1 decision, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta argued the board did not breach the First Amendment, and ordered a Miami federal judge to lift a preliminary injunction that allowed the book to be checked out from school libraries. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the legal challenge in 2009 and the book removal remains in place.

About Etsy
Etsy's mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. The company's vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade. The Etsy community of nine million members spans the globe with buyers and sellers coming from more than 150 countries. There are over 800,000 active Etsy sellers.

About JDB ebooks:
JDB ebooks is a Miami-based ePublisher of fiction and non-fiction books in electronic PDF formatting.

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