AIM discovers who is behind the pro-Cuban Government ad in the NYT
July 23, 2021
A well-financed, avowed Communist group spent what is estimated six figures to run a full-page ad in the New York Times to implore the Biden-Harris administration to lift sanctions on the Communist government in Cuba.
The ad is titled in bold, “Let Cuba Live.”
The People’s Forum’s open letter to the administration was signed by Black Lives Matter Global, Hollywood stars Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, Jane Fonda, Marissa Tomei, Mark Ruffalo, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky and the Vermont chapter of the AFL-CIO, amongst others.
See the full page statement today in the @nytimes. Visit https://t.co/OHwPozGZfx. This is a letter to @POTUS to #LetCubaLive. pic.twitter.com/ZPn4bWVh7v
— Vijay Prashad (@vijayprashad) July 23, 2021
“It is time to take a new path forward in U.S.-Cuban relations,” says the letter in part. “We, the undersigned, are making this urgent, public appeal to you to reject the cruel policies put into place by the Trump White House that have created so much suffering among the Cuban people.”
The full-page ad comes just 13 months after the New York Times editorial staff revolted over the publication of an editorial by Republican Senator Tom Cotton (AR), simply because they didn’t support the opinions of a sitting Republican Senator. But Communists are apparently A-OK with the New York Times.
The People’s Forum IRS form in 2019, lists no donors but shows it took in over $15 million that year, employing 43 people.
Its Executive Director, Claudia De La Cruz, describes her views as informed by “Latin American Liberation Theology and grassroots organizing.”
Liberation Theology is a Marxist philosophy that developed in Central and South America in the 1960s and 1970s and was condemned by the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for its radical politicization of the church. Like newly revived Critical Race Theory, Liberation Theology was previously studied only in classrooms as a curiosity of the past.
The issue of Cuban sanctions has taken on added impetus recently as Cuban protestors came into the streets recently to protest the lack of food, medicine and other necessities provided by the Cuban Communist regime.
While the U.S. has officially embargoed Cuba for decades, the Trump administration cracked down on the money that was privately flowing from the United States to Cuba because the money, while intended to take care of basic needs for regular people, ended up benefiting the Cuban Communist Party, which owns the stores and supplies the goods bought with U.S. dollars.
The Biden administration is looking for ways to restore that money flow, called remittances.
The People’s Forum ad, however, urges complete lifting of the U.S. embargo and the restoration of normal relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
“There is no reason to maintain the Cold War politics that required the U.S. to treat Cuba as an existential enemy rather than a neighbor,” says the People’s Forum letter.
The U.S. Embassy in Havana was reduced to essential personnel in 2017 after three dozen American diplomats suffered brain damage in what is thought to have been a brute force attack by some sort of directed energy weapon there.
Earlier in the week, the Biden-Harris administration announced their intention to restaff the embassy and restart the flow of private U.S. dollars to the Communist enclave.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio (FL), whose parents fled Cuba during the 1956 revolution there, spoke against the lifting of any sanctions by the Biden-Harris administration until Cubans are given freedom from the oppressive Communist regime after Cubans took to the streets shouting “liberty” in standing against socialist corruption.
“They didn’t stand up against all those things because of an embargo or because they wanted remittances. They stood up because they wanted liberty. Libertad. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they’re telling us. Why don’t we listen to them?” asked Rubio
Related: Reuters defends socialism when socialism can’t defend itself