Bill de Blasio is one scary guy. Particularly to Cuban-Americans. The liberal South Florida media may have tried to excuse away his cozy Che Guevara quote in Miami last week, but the New York City mayor and Democratic presidential hopeful has Sandinista ties that don't quit.
Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation that "fights for accountability and integrity in law, politics and government," exposed those ties in 2013 and this week they're circulating in Miami's Hispanic neighborhoods.
"No wonder (de Blasio) quoted Che Guevara, he admires the murdering commie," Luis Barzaga told Sunshine State News. Barzaga, a Cuban born American citizen and resident of Little Havana, said he is a registered Republican. He said he watched both nights of the Democratic Presidential Primary Debate and has been shocked by the things he's found online of de Blasio's past. "The more I read about him, the more I wonder why the Democrats haven't disowned him."
Disgusted Cuban-American U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, tweeted, “Bill DeBlasio went to a rally at the #Miami airport today & ended his speech by quoting from the murderous Che Guevara’s farewell letter to Fidel Castro.”
De Blasio apologized several times in Miami for uttering the quote, but was the apology sincere? You judge: In 2013 de Blasio repeated the same phrase while running for New York mayor, an occasion when he meant every word of the Che parrotry. See this March 7, 2013 newspaper article, "Mayoral Forum on Poverty had one candidate echoing a Marxist ..."
Miami Cubans remember Marxist revolutionary Che Guevera well. Not only do they remember the thousands of Cubans he tortured and executed, they remember that he referred to the United States as the “great enemy of mankind.” Guevara actually begged the Soviet Union to nuke the U.S., specifically New York, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles. He famously said, “against those hyenas there is no option but extermination. ...If the missiles had remained in Cuba, we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City!”
This is why even fellow Democrats were enraged by de Blasio’s Guevara quote, and took to Twitter to show it. Florida Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, D-Miami, tweeted that "quoting a murderer responsible for death and oppression in communist Cuba and throughout Latin America is not acceptable." His Democratic colleague in the state Senate, Annette Taddeo, posted her disgust. “How can anyone wanting to be the leader of the free world quote a murderous guerrilla -- in Miami, no less! A community filled with his victims!”
But it's the 2013 work of Judicial Watch that has Hispanic Floridians so wound up this week. What the watchdog organization uncovered were documents showing de Blasio was an active supporter of a brutal communist regime well known as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
De Blasio was so enamored with Soviet-backed revolutionaries he traveled to the capital city of the war-torn country, Managua, to aid their cause by participating in a relief mission. Upon de Blasio’s return to the United States, he joined the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York (NSN).
Judicial Watch examined the records of the NSN at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, located on the campus of New York University (NYU) in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. The archive is also the NYU “Reference Center for Marxist Studies.” According to the archive record guide: “The Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York (1985-2002), and its member organizations, worked to support the Sandinista Revolution and to protest U.S. support of the counter-revolutionary military movement, aka the Contras, who also killed civilian supporters of the revolution, targeting medical and educational personnel in particular.”
The records show de Blasio was an ardent supporter of the communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua, raised funds for the Sandinistas and was a subscriber to the party’s newspaper, “Barricada” (The Barricade). He traveled to Nicaragua in 1988 and became active in the NSN as soon as he returned to the U.S.
You should also know the New York mayor has been unapologetic about his involvement with a foreign Marxist political movement accused of slaughtering innocent civilians and practicing the “disappearance” technique of eliminating political foes. In fact, the Sandinistas were renowned as one of Latin America’s worst human rights violators.
Says Judicial Watch, "During three years of revolution, they carried out thousands of political executions and the disappearance of thousands more who were considered anti-revolutionary, according to a Russian-born scholar cited in a news article. By 1983 there were about 20,000 political prisoners held in the Marxist regime’s jails, the highest number of political prisoners of any nation in the hemisphere with the exception of Castro’s communist Cuba."
Judicial Watch points out these things: "In 1996 de Blasio ran the Clinton-Gore campaign in New York State; he then served as the senior Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official for the New York/New Jersey region from 1997 to 1999. During that period, HUD was defrauded of more than $70 million in de Blasio’s region. That didn’t stop the Clintons from tapping him to run Hillary Clinton’s successful 2000 U.S. Senate campaign. De Blasio subsequently served on the New York City Council and as Public Advocate, the city’s second-highest elected official, before being elected mayor. Now he wants to be president of the United States."
Something to think about on the day we celebrate and honor this great country.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
