By Ron Ridenour
“Yankees Go Home”, “Out of Cuba”, “Cuba Si, Yankee No”. We sang and we wrote on placards that we carried back and forth before the US Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, California on April 19, 1961. It was here that I joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
This was the first time I had demonstrated, and here I was opposing “my” government, which I had “defended” between 1956 and 1960. I had recently been discharged from the United States Air Force, which I had joined at 17, in order to fight “communism”. What I learned those years was that it was the US that was the aggressor. We constantly flew over and harassed Russian, Chinese and Cuban territory, yet we airmen and soldiers had orders that if “the enemy” did the same we were to shoot them down. They never did “trespass” however.
It was Cuba’s revolution that woke me up to the reality of US’s murderous, domineering foreign policy, which had been true since the very beginning of its independence from Great Brittan.
“Born in the USA: regimen of permanent wars” describes this history. http://www.ronridenour.com/articles/2012/1223--rr.htm [1]
At the top of my website are quotations, which explain why I became an activist against US Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine and for a socialist alternative, something Fidel stood for.
"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms,” former CIA official John Stockwell, wrote.
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke
Fidel was a champion in the pantheon of the people, a man who made indelible contributions in the global struggle for equality and emancipation. He will be remembered for many reasons, among them:
¤ Fidel led his country out of poverty, creating employment for all, bringing the infant mortality rate down under the US level, advancing the literacy rate higher than in the US, abolishing official racism, acting in solidarity with the poor and oppressed throughout Latin American and Africa, assisting Vietnam militarily against the US goliath. These struggles favoring the poor over the rich inspired billions of people, many of whom voted their progressive political parties into power.
¤ Without the solidarity Cuba’s leadership and soldiers offered to Angola, and indirectly to Namibia and the black people of South Africa, white racist South Africa with US-Israel support would have likely crushed their struggles for sovereignty. Furthermore, Nelson Mandela would have died in prison—that is what I heard him say in Cuba standing beside Fidel soon after his release from prison. And Fidel not only sent military assistance, he organized the sending of hundreds of thousands of highly educated Cubans around the world to heal and to teach…
For the rest of this article by RON RIDENOUR in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3377 [2]