Cuba Idiot Alert — Nathan Turner and Ruth Lacey

Here's another example of how one of the biggest challenges facing children today are their idiot teachers:

New York City high school teacher Nathan Turner loves Fidel Castro.

And Ché Guevara, too.

He has the posters on the walls of his classroom to prove it.

So much so, he took about a dozen of his students on a spring break trip to Cuba — giving them a first-hand experience in what it's like to break the law.

In another exclusive about Americans cavorting in Cuba, the New York Post reports:

A group of Manhattan public high-school students and a history teacher with a soft spot for Cuba flouted federal travel restrictions by taking a spring-break field trip to the communist nation - and now face up to $65,000 apiece in fines, The Post has learned.

The lesson in socializing and socialism was given to about a dozen students from the selective Beacon School on the Upper West Side, which for years has organized extravagant overseas trips with complementary semester-long classes.

Some past destinations include France, Spain, South Africa, Venezuela, Mexico and, according to the school Web site, Cuba in 2004 and 2005.

The principal, Ruth Lacey, insisted she did not approve the April 1-10 jaunt, in which students and teachers said the group was briefly detained on their return by American customs officials in The Bahamas and now faces fines.

In a telephone interview, Lacey initially claimed to have no knowledge of the trip but later recalled having denied approval for it. She said the teacher, Nathan Turner, then took it upon himself to arrange the excursion.

Turner, 35, a popular teacher whose classroom walls, students said, are adorned with posters of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, declined to comment.

"I don't know anything about the trip because it wasn't school-sponsored. I only care about the trips that go through the school," Lacey said. "This, to me, would be an outrage if it happened."

Lacey is right about that, but then she reveals her idiot colors when she confirmed that she had approved two previous student trips to Cuba.

"At the time, I think the climate in the country was different," Lacey said.

Is she talking about Cuba, where the oppression today is about the same as it was then? Or is she talking about the United States, with some politicians falling over themselves to make nice with the dictatorship and hope for many such trips by Americans?

Lacey was smart to backtrack from her original denial of knowledge about the trip. After all, Turner last October posted a notice about it on the school's Web site.

As for the trip, there was no word whether Michael Moore filmed the whole thing.

E-mail your thoughts about this fiasco to Turner and/or Lacey.

(H/T Malkin.)