Today would be the 99th birthday of Cuban communist dictator and revolutionary Fidel Castro. He died in 2016, leaving many detractors, prisons full of political prisoners and . . . some deluded fans.
Justin Trudeau, then the Canadian prime minister, offered a conspicuously warm eulogy:
I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.
On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.
Since 1969, more than 10,000 similarly obtuse Americans have shown their solidarity with Cuban communism by joining the Venceremos Brigade.
According to the InfluenceWatch profile:
The Venceremos Brigade is a radical-left activist group that organizes trips to communist-ruled Cuba as a way for sympathetic Americans to demonstrate their solidarity with the country’s government and their opposition to related United States government policies. As of 2024, it is a fiscally-sponsored project of The People’s Forum, a charitable nonprofit, and was formerly a project of the Alliance for Global Justice. The word “Venceremos” translates as “we shall overcome,” and Venceremos Brigade participants are commonly referred to as brigadistas.
Founded in 1969 by members of the radical New Left activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the original objective of the Venceremos Brigade was to help Cuba produce 10 million tons of sugar during the 1970 harvest, though this goal was ultimately not achieved.
And by “not achieved” it meant:
The 1970 Cuban harvest failed to produce 10 million tons of sugar. A U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) memorandum reported that it had yielded 8.5 million metric tons, which was an all-time record for the country but still 1.5 million tons short of the government’s publicized goal. The report noted that the additional resources which had been diverted to assist with the harvest had negatively impacted other sectors of the Cuban economy—such as construction and manufacturing—and speculated that the increased sugar yields would probably strike “many Cubans as a hollow victory, without benefit to the population.”
According to a 1974 article in the New York Times, over-saturation of the global sugar market depressed prices to such an extent that the 1970 Cuban harvest was one of the least-profitable in the country’s history up to that point. The extra manpower and other resources devoted to the harvest had resulted in a 25 percent drop in milk production and a 38 percent drop in steel production, among other negative economic impacts. The article concluded that “however one looked at it,” the effort had been a “disaster.” Nevertheless, some prominent brigadistas criticized what they called “the predictable American habit of defining ‘success’ in terms of quantity,” and argued that the harvest had not been a “qualitative” failure because of the “degree of commitment, revolutionary consciousness and energy to work” that the effort had demonstrated.
But yesterday’s revolutionary communists have a way of turning into today’s regime politicians and leaders of lefty advocacy nonprofits:
Numerous prominent left-wing academics, activists, and political figures have been affiliated with the Venceremos Brigade, including Los Angeles Mayor and former U.S. Representative Karen Bass (D-CA), former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D), prominent labor union official and Clinton administration appointee Karen Nussbaum, former Spelman College and Bennett College president Johnnetta Cole, Georgetown University professor and former Dissent magazine co-editor Michael Kazin, former Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner, Pueblo Action Alliance director Julia Bernal, and former member of the domestic terrorist group May 19th Communist Organization and Thousand Currents board member Susan Rosenberg.
Ramparts, the flagship New Left publication of the late 1960s and early 1970s, also featured a hilarious report from a brigadista who could not distinguish between press freedom and propaganda.
According to the InfluenceWatch profile of Ramparts:
“A Letter from Camp Venceremos,” posted in the August 1970 Ramparts, provided another positive portrayal of the Cuban dictatorship. The author, Chris Camarano, was a member of the first Venceremos Brigade [. . .] Camarano wrote this of her impressions of Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro:
Fidel is totally fantastic—completely overwhelming. He is direct, candid, immediate, humble, brilliant, audacious. Some of us were able to have an informal rap with him and he told us wonderful stories about the fighting in the Sierra Maestra. Lots of funny incidents came rushing out. Jesus, he was so lit up—could have gone on for hours, I’m sure.
She also wrote that the Cuban press was superior to the American media:
The news reports here show even Movement news service in the States to be truly for shit. There are zillions of important things happening all over the world every day that are never mentioned in our press—especially Latin American and Far Eastern news. Of course we all knew this before-but even the most skeptical of us never understood the degree to which everything is sifted, selected, distorted.
The reports here are fantastic—extensive, detailed coverage of even the smallest events in all countries. Radio broadcasts last for hours and offer not only good reportage but a lot of analysis. As a result, the general level of political consciousness here is something not to be believed.
In addition to Venceremos Brigade and Ramparts, other InfluenceWatch profiles touching on the Castro regime and Americans sympathetic to it include those for the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
