JERRY BROWN has been an unabashed and stalwart devotee of left-wing politics throughout his career, but in recent years he has led many to believe that he has joined the political mainstream. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and as mayor of Oakland, Brown has once again reaffirmed his longtime sympathies for leftist causes, while consistently working to undermine U.S. foreign policy with regard to Cuba's communist regime.
In the February 28, 2002 issue of the Nation, reporter Marc Cooper wrote of his encounter with the mayor and of an item in his possession; a memento of Brown's apparent affinity for the Latin American communist movement:
As I get into Mayor Jerry Brown's city-owned black Town Car, he scrambles to move a folded red and black flag on the front seat out of my way. "You know what this is?" he asks as he puts it in the back seat. "It looks like an original flag from Castro's July 26 movement," I answer. "You got it," says the Mayor. "It was given to me by Ché Guevara's widow one night after I spent eight hours talking to Castro. I'm taking it home from my office to keep it in a safe place."
Upon hearing this statement, many Americans might pause to question the apparent friendly relationship with the communist dictator and his allies. What is a person repeatedly elected to serve the American people doing spending hours speaking to Fidel Castro? Why would the widow of Latin America's most notorious guerilla leader bequeath such a memento to him? And why would any liberty-loving person want to have, in their own home, a symbol of such a violent and repressive movement?
Lest we forget, behind that ubiquitous image now plastered on so many t-shirts and stickers, Ernesto "Ché" Guevara was a ruthless militant who is personally responsible for the torture and murder of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of Cubans. It was Ché who helped institute Cuba's gulags and was himself the commander of the notorious La Cabaña prison, where political prisoners and dissidents were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. It was Ché who brought before the firing squads the enemies of Cuba's new dictator and is said to have personally engaged in summary executions. According to the New Republic,
In April 1967, speaking from experience, [Ché] summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his "Message to the Tricontinental": "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."
One wonders how Brown, a man opposed to lawful capital punishment, could treasure an emblem of anarchical slaughter. One wonders how Brown, a man of Jesuit training, could possibly identify with a man whose revolutionary zeal lead him to declare, "if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm."
Likewise one can only be shocked by Brown's continued fawning over Fidel Castro. To take just a single example, consider the heart-wrenching testimony of human rights activist and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Armando Valladares--a devout Catholic who spent 22 years in Castro's gulags in part for refusing to place a pro-communist placard on his office desk:
All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my freedom. My freedom is not the space where you can walk around. There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk, and they are not free. For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.
UNDER JERRY BROWN'S LEADERSHIP, Oakland has adopted as one of its sister cities, the town of Santiago de Cuba, from where Castro launched his original July 26 movement, which ultimately led to his dictatorship.
In July of 2000, Mayor Brown led a delegation from Oakland to Cuba. The avowed purpose of the visit was the formal recognition of the sister cities relationship, but as the San Francisco Chronicle noted, "these trips are political junkets designed to recast Cuba in the eyes of the American people and pressure federal legislators to remove the barriers thrown up when Cuba became a communist state in 1959."
