OPINION: De Blasio, Cuba and the Sandinistas
Recently, a lot of to-do has been made about former Brooklyn councilman and current mayoral candidate and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s left-wing background. It turns out that when he was young, in the 1980s, he went to Nicaragua to volunteer with the Sandinistas. Later, after he married his wife, Chirlane McCray, they honeymooned in Cuba.
First, let me make it clear that I’m not a fan of either Cuba or the Sandinistas. In the 1950s, the Batista government in Cuba (backed by American gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano) was so corrupt that people were hungry for a change. When Castro took power in 1959, he Cuban people were ecstatic. But within a year or two, he started showing dictatorial tendencies, and more and more Cubans began leaving the country. Some people think that Castro was basically a charismatic populist, and only the United States’ hostile actions toward him pushed him toward the Soviet Union. Others think he was a dedicated communist from the beginning. I don’t know the answer—I’ll let the professional historians debate that. The fact is, however, that by 1963, Cuba was formally a one-party state, with no tolerance for dissent, and had merely exchanged one master (the Soviet Union) for another (the United States).
Nicaragua is somewhat more complicated. As in Cuba, a populist leader, Daniel Ortega, overthrew a corrupt dictator. His Sandinistas embarked on a program that included mass literacy, accessible healthcare and women’s rights. Unfortunately, they also persecuted rival political parties and allied themselves with Cuba and later Iran. At any rate, after a bloody civil war (during which the U.S. backed the Sandinistas’ opponents, the “contras”), the Sandinistas held elections. Today, Ortega is a respected elder statesman.