New Left Totalitarians Celebrate Castro’s Victory

518024350_15_ov1“I first went to Cuba in January 1968, during the height of revolutionary aspirations,” writes New Left celebrity Tom Hayden in “50 Years Later It’s Time for Closure,” a Dec. 21 oped piece in the Sacramento Bee. On recent visits Hayden hung out with Cuba’s former minister of foreign affairs Ricardo Alarcon, and that inspired Hayden to write the forthcoming Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters. Meanwhile, Tom Hayden is excited about recent moves by President Obama.

“The Cuban Revolution has achieved its aim,” Hayden explains, “recognition of the sovereign right of its people to revolt against the Yankee Goliath and survive as a state in a sea of global solidarity.” Further, “After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a decade of American triumphalism based on the mistaken belief that the Cuban state would collapse like East Germany. We underestimated Cuban nationalism.”

However, “a sticking point on the U.S. side was the persistent funding of ‘democracy promotion,’ or our secret efforts to promote a more open society.” Hayden further explains that Alan Gross “was a covert agent, not a home appliance distributor.”

Cuban spies Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez, were all tried and imprisoned in the United States for gathering intelligence on U.S. air bases. They also infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and tipped off the Castro regime, which scrambled MIG fighters and downed one of the Brothers’ unarmed planes, killing four people. Tom Hayden’s take is rather different: “The Cuban Five were protecting Cuba’s security from us, not acting as terrorists.”

Hayden contends that key episodes in Cuban history are “best recalled” through Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II. Fortunately, American viewers can gain knowledge of Cuba in films by actual Cubans that cover events Tom Hayden and Ricardo Alarcon prefer to avoid.

When Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa returned from his military campaign in Africa, “8A,” a play on his name, began to appear on walls all over the island. Long oppressed Cubans believed the popular general was the only one with a chance to topple Fidel Castro’s Communist dictatorship. Fidel knew it too. He held a show trial for Ochoa and put it on satellite television. Cuban filmmaker Orlando Jimenez Leal taped it and made the documentary “8A.”

Viewers can see the regime’s lawyers demanding that their clients get the death penalty. Fidel Castro agreed and on July 12, 1989 duly carried out the sentence by firing squad, just like back in the revolutionary days. No appeal process, and no more threat from Arnaldo Ochoa.

In “Improper Conduct” Jimenez Leal and cinematographer Nestor Almendros portrayed the Castro regime’s repressions against political dissidents, journalists, poets and homosexuals. The New York Times called the film “convincing” and former Castro supporter Susan Sontag said “The discovery that homosexuals were being persecuted in Cuba shows how much the Left needs to evolve.”

It will be interesting to see what Tom Hayden says about this in his new book Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters. In the meantime, readers might consult books written by actual Cubans.

In Against All Hope, which has been compared to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Cuban dissident Armando Valladares charts 20 years in Castro’s prisons, and the violence he and other political prisoners suffered. Arrested in 1960, Valladares was not freed until 1982. This came through the efforts of French president Francois Mitterand and human rights organizations. A ballpark figure for the number of Cuban dissidents the American New Left has supported is zero.

In Family Portrait with Fidel, Carlos Franqui charts the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1964. Franqui broke ranks over Fidel’s shift to Soviet Communism, after which “nothing worked.” The privations of the regime get extensive treatment in Heberto Padilla’s novel, Heroes are Grazing in My Garden.

In The Longest Romance, Humberto Fontova calculates that between 65,000 and 85,000 people have died trying to escape Cuba, 30 times the number of Berlin Wall casualties. Cuba’s prison population is 90 percent black and includes Eusebio Penlaver, “the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner.” That wasn’t a sticking point for Barack Obama.

Tom Hayden recently showed up in Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton. Author Lee Ellis was shot down over North Vietnam, imprisoned and tortured. Americans were kept in cages with their legs tied together and arms laced behind the back until the elbows touched and shoulders pulled out of joint. Some Americans were kept awake for two weeks and beaten, but the treatment wasn’t just physical.

As Ellis explains, the prison guards piped in propaganda broadcasts by Tom Hayden, a “regular speaker” who supported the regime and said the reports of torture were nothing but lies.  Given that record, Cuban prisons may soon ring with readings from Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters, by Tom Hayden.

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  • BS77

    Tom Hayden looks like a communist Jimmy Durante…or is that the famous liar, Pinnochio?

  • Bamaguje

    If America was anything like Castro’s Cuba, traitors like Hayden would have been executed decades ago.

    “After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a decade of American triumphalism based on the mistaken belief that the Cuban state would collapse like East Germany. We underestimated Cuban nationalism” – Tom Hayden.

    No, we underestimated the brutality of Castro’s tyranny to remain in power at all costs. Castro brothers do not represent the Cuban people.

    “Americans were kept in cages with their legs tied together and arms laced behind the back until the elbows touched and shoulders pulled out of joint. Some Americans were kept awake for two weeks and beaten…” – Lloyd Billingsley.

    But America’s left hypocritically whines about CIA waterboarding as “torture.”

    • Dan Knight

      LOL … they only complain about waterboarding murderers. ;-)

  • http://johnnyangeladvocacygroup.net JohnnyAngel Advocacy Group

    Hayden,Fonda & Kerry were all traitors and should be hung STILL !!!

  • john in cheshire

    Does Mr Hayden live in Cuba? If not then why not?

    • carpe diem 36

      see my comment. Smart minds think alike.

    • Del_Varner

      I believe he lives in the Peoples Democratic Republic of Santa Monica.

    • catherineinpvb

      Interesting how these people are fascinated – and determined – in their building a ‘paradise’; and where there is one, ‘at hand’, and by their collective hand. . .they choose ‘not’, to live there.

  • Hard Little Machine

    Well apparently all the far left rich white apparatchiks can now indulge in Cuba’s much vaunted socialism for the wealthy and powerful healthcare system.

  • Hard Little Machine

    By the By Cuba announced they have zero intention of so much as even discussing the return of American criminals living in Cuba, such as Joanne Chesimard.

    • JayWye

      Not surprising. They’ve won,Comrade Obama surrendered,and has to beg for (or buy) whatever Cuba will give him.

      • Hard Little Machine

        Or, it’s simply of a set piece of empty meaningless bullshit that is the sole output of the White House. Next Obama will claim to have solved global warming….because he said so.

  • stringman

    It is my understsnding and, it makes sense: Ask yourself …..why now? Why did Obama choose this moment to lift the embargo? The Cuban economy was finally at its end. As bad as things have been for fifty years, it was finally on its last gasp. Obama wants american business and tourism to come to the rescue. There were no other options left.

    And we can’t have this horrible economic blemish on the record of communism to remind the world what an abject failure it has all been….now can we? So here comes Barry to the rescue.

    I am so sick of that guy!

    • carpe diem 36

      I hope that all businesses will show how patriotic they are by not sending even one penny to help Cuba. Let the evil brothers get what they deserve. But of course Obama does not care one whit about the people, he wants Communism to “succeed” by propping it up with American money. Ain’t gonna happen.

      • stringman

        Amen Brother.

        • carpe diem 36

          call me sister.

          • stringman

            Dang. This just in: It has already happened once before. China has been proping is communist regimes up with american business commerce for decades. SCREW SOCIALISM has accurately pointed out that congress must approve any plan to end the embargo. Presidents can’t, on their own. We’ll see.

    • SCREW SOCIALISM

      I believe only Congress can lift the embargo on Cuba.

      Cuba trades with other countries, yet the socialist workers paradise can’t get off of the bottom of the barrel.

    • His Excellency

      Just keep in mind that the so-called “embargo” is too full of holes to be an actual embargo. There have been many items imported from the United States to Cuba, especially in recent years, all as a result of the current Washington administration trying to cozy up to the Communist dictatorship in Cuba.

      • stringman

        Yeah and they’re still on the ropes. They don’t have oil to prop them up like Russia and Venezuela and Iran. I have to smile when I see the oil price dropping like a stone. It’s really hitting them where it hurts.

  • roccolore

    Democrats: “We love Cuba and worship Castro, but we’re not moving there because we won’t have our mansions and wealth.”

    • JayWye

      AND because those mansions and wealth could suddenly be expropriated by Castro.

  • http://www.clarespark.com/ Clare Spark

    UCLA paid 1 million dollars for a portion of Susan Sontag’s library and papers (?). Not even the whole thing.

  • Scar

    My late father, a Berkeley cop, had the pleasure of “interacting” with Hayden during a “sit-in” at UC’s Sproul Hall back in the 60s. I won’t discuss the details, but I think Dad enjoyed their “conversation” a lot more than Hayden did. It’s so nice to enjoy your work! This POS should be dead or rotting in prison along with his traitorous ex-wife.

  • tagalog

    I see from the photo that time has not been entirely kind to Tom Hayden.

  • vonrock

    The couple thousand Muslims there have been unable to build a mosque, They complain that the Russians have a orthodox church, we want a mosque. No !
    Now with Obama’s plan of a Muslim world, what do ya think ? Build it or else.

  • carpe diem 36

    the older this piece of cr@p gets the more despicable and vicious and disgusting he get. I would make him go and live in Cuba forever.

  • http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/ Edward Cline

    Methinks Tom Hayden is not only a decrepit-looking creature, but also a dipsomaniac. That nose is the “tell.” I’m betting his forthcoming book was ghost-written, perhaps by fellow-communist Bill Ayers . He doesn’t look as though he could scrawl “Yankee Go Home” on a lavatory wall.

  • Bob Sten

    HAHAHA. Hayden looks like WC Fields with that nose. What a bitter old, hippie, alcoholic windbag.

    It’s awesome to be alive during this time….to see all these old hippies dropping off like flies. These old pieces of trash are dying in the hundreds, every week. Finally. These loons ruined the west, so it’s a pleasure to watch them die.

    - a former left winger

    • UCSPanther

      These Castro supporters are just as tired and decrepit as the regime they venerate…

  • Erudite Mavin

    I remember when Radical Leftist Tom Hayden, his SDS and the usual cast of Marxists were in the streets during the 60s rioting.
    The Marxist crowd along with the Ron and Rand Paul Libertarians who are also cheering on in favor of Cuba might not want to shake all their pom poms yet.
    The Republicans take over the Senate in January and both houses will look to
    pop a hole in the left wing – libertarian balloon

  • Dan Knight

    Tom Hayden is a classic Libtard: A Death Eater. A lover of violence, suffering, rape, slavery, murder, poverty, unhappiness, and war. What else can be said?

  • catherineinpvb

    Thank You, Lloyd Billingsley, for giving note to ‘ why the Left’. . .and Obama. . . had Cuba on their mind; as many are still asking: ‘why now, Cuba’? And many more, mindlessly, anticipating their new vacation destination. (While Cuban citizens plan theirs; as best they might.)

    Can only add here; a meaningless congratulations to Obama and the ‘Left’; for their own version of Nation building . . . not in Cuba; but rather, for their importing//implementing Fidel’s values – and those of celeb world Dictators – right here at home, in America. All per Change, only fools, believe in. A long-standing nightmare, now beginning it’s serious burn in America; by way of the ‘hate America’ Left – America’s political pyromaniacs’. They cannot contain their pleasure, as they smell the smoke; watch the flames, and see blood spilledon America’s streets.

    As for this destructive, Utilitarian Left; the morally ‘reasoned’ citizenry of America, do not have to ask; where would America be today, without you?

  • catherineinpvb

    (Yes, 7K communists, like Jane – they could not succeed w/o Government help, right?) Of course; only ‘one’ Fonda, with ‘traitor’ attached.