“When Bonnie Raitt won the award for Song of the Year at the 2023 Grammys on Sunday night for her track Just Like That,” The Daily Mail reports this week, “some were shocked that the accolade went to the 73-year-old folk singer – over huge artists like Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Harry Styles, Beyonce and Adele, who were also nominated for the category.”
Much less shocking, given Raitt’s social and political milieu, is this rock and roller’s propaganda ministrations for the only regime in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere to criminalize rock & roll and herd its practitioners and fans into forced- labor camps.
You see, amigos: Back in March of 1999, Bonnie Raitt was among the top acts of a celebrity-studded propaganda extravaganza for Stalinist Cuba titled “Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters.” During her visit to the Castro-Family-Fiefdom Raitt stopped hyperventilating just long enough to compose a song in Fidel Castro’s honor titled, “Cuba Is Way Too Cool!” Among the lyrics: “It’s just a happy little island!” and “Big bad wolf (the U.S.) you look the FOOL!”
With Woody Harrelson gyrating drunkenly beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse, she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots, rasped out her ditty at Havana’s Karl Marx theater. “Rock Against Freedom” sounds much better to me. A beaming, waving Jimmy Buffet came on after Bonnie.
Then came Joane Osborne. R.E.M’s. Peter Buck , former Police-men Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland all made the groovy scene and took the stage in turn. In between crooning and strumming, these cheeky free-spirits all dutifully recited their propaganda scripts against the U.S. “embargo.”
Against South Africa a decade earlier, of course, their script called FOR an embargo.
A crowd of 5000 Cubans huddled before them, swaying and clapping. All were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. Let’s step back and contemplate the scene: here’s these troubadours for human rights, here’s the same smarmy gang who boycotted South Africa (“I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City!” thundered Bonnie Raitt herself alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled, “Artists United Against Apartheid.”)
But she’ll GLADLY play in Havana’s Karl Marx theater and bask in the applause of an audience pledging proud fealty to the most murderous ideology in human history. Indeed she’ll happily compose a song in their honor–and all on the house!
Here’s Bonnie and other shrill foes of capital punishment happily crooning lovesongs to card-carrying members (literally!) of an ideology whose minions shot, starved, strangled, drowned, hacked and worked to death 100 million human beings in the 20th century. According to the late researcher Dr. Armando Lago many in Bonnie and Jimmy’s very audience had a hand in 110,000 of these murders. Here’s these do-gooders playing (free-of-charge) because of an invitation from Stalinists!
These musical hipsters composed gushy odes to coolness and happiness of a nation with the highest (youth) emigration, incarceration and suicide rates on the face of the globe.
When Cuba’s suicide rate reached 24 per thousand in 1986– making it double Latin America’s average, making it triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48–at that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.
But apparently not Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters. When in his charming presence, neither of these feminists could keep from bursting into those toothy smiles and throwing their arms around the man who drove more women to end their lives than anyone in the world.
Cuba also has the world’s highest (or third highest, depending on the source) abortion rate. I say there’s a relationship with the suicide rate. They both smack of hopelessness and despair.
In Castroland Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly authored paeans to the coolness and happiness of a place that also criminalized Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ records–where long hair, blue jeans, and/or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off the streets by secret police and dumped in concentration camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You,” in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG. But the conditions were identical.
Much “wasting away” within their barbed wire, Mr Buffet. But not from Margaritas. Slave labor, disease, malnutrition, beatings, torture and hunger strikes caused the “wasting way.” Stepping on pop-tops is no fun, I agree, Mr Buffet. But neither is being bludgeoned to death with the blunt end of bayonets, a pastime much indulged by your charming Castroite hosts. Armando Valladares provides harrowing details of scores of such deaths in his Against All Hope.
The blight is also known as Castroism, and is also known as inspiration for happy little jingles by Bonnie Raitt.
Thank you, I had not known about this…say party scene.
Owr present cultural icons seem to be a despicable lot.
And the damnable fools pride themselves on it.
Leftists fools major in emotional reflection & group-think; rational analysis seems to annoy them.
They’re all moronic idiots ignorant of & uncaring about the horrors those homicidal Castro minions foisted upon everyone. These are the same idiots who saw “Motorcycle Diaries” & thought Ché was a good guy fighting for The Peopke.🤣🤣🤣
Thanks for exposing this situation Humberto!
I understand she is a big time Environmentalists herself
I remember her name but can’t recall any of her music. Kinda sums her up really.
That’s why no one knows who she is. So why is Humberto fixated on someone that is invisible?
She WAS there and had been very well known in the past so in my book she’s fair game.
Exactly. So why is Humberto trying to raise her profile?
Well, time to take Raitt CDs to the used CD store and get some cash.
So as to make it easier and cheaper for others to listen to her music? Please clarify this logic.
Whenever I find that some musical/film artist that I liked in the past turns out to be raving leftist I dump the CD or DVD at the nearest used audio store.
But that’s just me. Might as well make a little cash in the process. You can do what you like.
That’s why no one knows who she is. So why is Humberto fixated on someone that is invisible?
Bobby Raitt’s family has money, that is why she was able to squander her time on a useless education. Back in the late 1960’s she was graduate of Negro or Black studies or whatever title they were using back then. Also on mommy and daddy’s dime she had the luxury of time, and traveled down South to learn guitar from some of great Blues guitarist.
When I was young and she was young and starting out, she gave a concert in the basement of the student union at my university. I never, never thought she would go full pro Castro, she seems to be imitating Jane Fonda and other hollywood stars. Too, too bad. I think her father was a Broadway musical star who did musicals like Rodgers and Hammerstein. She should have followed in his footsteps.
More useful idiots for The Cause. They are so balloon-headed that they don’t even think that under the regimes they think so highly of, they would be nothing.
One has to admit, they are not the deep thinkers they see themselves to be. Their tunes would change if they didn’t have the luxury of boarding a plane to return to the land that made them rich and famous. None of them ever stay after the party is over. It doesn’t pay enough.
Karl Marx Theater, that tells a lot about the Cuba’s Communist government. Why would you name a building after someone you do not admire.
Anyone who thinks Cuba is not communist, here is the proof.
Just one small point – the award was for the best song, not the best artist. Please make sure you recognize the difference. Should we consider Burt Bacharach’s politics when judging his songs???
Yes you should judge him. I do it with movies. There are some talented stars I just can’t stand to go see, and many more I have come to dislike.
That is why the woke movies make no real money. Hell, ever since they started hating Bush, and the Iraq war out of ignorance.
Ahhh….blazing hot TRUTH, burning off all phoniness and pretentious dross. Thank you, sir, for being the expert vessel through which this refreshing dose of truth was served! I’m deeply grateful.
I sincerely appreciate the exposition of the incredible hypocrisy of those who earn a fortune in a mixed-capitalist society entertaining people who choose to spend the money they earned on these artists. I’ve seen both Springsteen and Raitt in concert and enjoy listening to much of their music. Consumers voting with their dollars made these entertainers wealthy. I have no intention of not listening to their music just because I disagree with their politics.
How hypocritical is Springsteen? He’s gotten farm subsidies and his daughter represented the U.S. in Olympics in equestrian. events. Here’s a photo of all the non-rich people I know who can afford to participate in that sport–> <– Free markets rock! That photo is identical to the one of me watching the Grammy Award ceremony on tv. I've got better things to do, such as reading some Thomas Sowell.
The embargo has given the failed Communist country a convenient but bogus excuse for its dismal condition.
Bach. Mozart. And more. I cannot list them all. Plus many other modern, unamed, calm music, composers/musicians whose name(s) I do not know: nor their politics.
I prefer that.
Bonnie, Sting (Stench), and all the rest of your group that reflexively gets the floor: STFU.
If you were a performer in Cuba, your wealth, if you had any, would be measures in nickles.
Go away…
FJB
Today we see a Canadian and an Englishman, like Neil Young and Graham Nash singing about No War, both of whom have lived in America since the late 1960s and we all went along with that but now both of them despise Trump and yet he is the ONLY President that calls for an end to these endless Wars and wanted no more new Wars during his four years in Office, so explain that to me…
Meanwhile they both support Old Joe who BOMBED Syria within 6 weeks of being in the Oval Office.
Neil Young became a US Citizen in 2020 or just before in order that he could vote against Trump, he personally made that statement, he did not become a Citizen due to the fact that he lived in America since 1966 and it was America, and NOT Canada, that made him rich and famous..
All those Old Rockers, and I grew up with them ALL, are now a bunch of hypocrites as they worship a system that would never have allowed them to become who they became.
Hail hail Rock N Roll.