Rosemary Mealy’s book Fidel and Malcolm: Memories of a Meeting recounts that after Castro’s team were refused stay at a Manhattan hotel, it was Malcolm X who invited them to Harlem, and Black-owned Hotel Theresa, where they both also held a number of meetings.
This is one of my favorite, if not my favorite-favorite, Fidel story.
Fucking superhero level shit.
I’m a big fan of the one where the CIA recruited his ex to kill him (after he admittedly did a shitty thing by forcibly stealing her unborn child away.) and she fell straight back in love.
I’m inclined to agree, but she claims she was drugged and the baby was taken, so…maybe there’s a Castro in a middle-ranking party position in Cuba. I don’t think it was aborted though, no Doctor does that at 7 fucking months.
That would have been back when they did twilight births. I have no idea if they did that for her but it would be in keeping with obstetric prarices of cuba at the time.
For twilight births they would just sedate the woman so she didn’t have to have any pain and would just wake up when it was done happy and well rested. The problem was it was real hard to keep the patients sedated to the appropriate level. So you have have hugely traumatic confusion and pain during a tense procedure. So imagine being confused, hallucinating, in pain, tied down, then your baby is gone. The trauma of that mixed with post pardum would easily explain any number of situations.
Or I could be completely wrong and it was something else.
You leftists claim that Cuba is a classless society, yet Fidel Castro was a class act.
Curious.
I can’t but wonder if the response in Harlem to Fidel played a part in bringing about US government concessions to the civil rights movement. White folks at the time were scared shitless black folks would discover communism (you know, because of the centuries of brutal oppression at the hands of capitalism), and the sight of thousands of Harlem residents cheering on Fidel had to have made the ruling class nervous.
Iirc in the Autobiography of Malcolm X, he discusses how the 1963 March on Washington had a much, much more militant nature to it (citywide shutdown, not just a march and a speech) before MLK and the “mainstream” civil rights movement got involved
White folks at the time were scared shitless black folks would discover communism
Black folks had already discovered communism. there were Black communists and trade unionists in America, especially in the South, in the 1930s, that were brutally repressed. Read Hammer & Hoe by Robin Kelley. Read Wilmington’s Lie by David Zucchino. There were even black socialist leaders in the United states in the 1800s. Like Peter H Clark and George Washington Woodbey. There was a Prussian immigrant US civil war colonel who was a Communist and a member of the first international. August Willich. There was another Prussian civil war colonel, Joseph Weydermeyer, who started the American Workers League in 1853. So the moment Communism stepped foot on American soil, from Europe, in the 1800s, it immediately became involved with the abolition of slavery.
So beautiful. Not just spiting Ike, but making a very clear point. Ike can meet with his peers among whom are puppets, killers, oligarchs, etc. And Fidel will meet with his equals, his peers, common workers, the toilers.
:wojak-nooo: but…but… he didn’t eat lunch with them out of any respect to the proletariat or fellow leftists…he was just being a narcissist and one upping Eisenhowser…also it was just propaganda for his regime!
