Reflections On Fidel, Cuba, Internationalism & Tamils
By Ron Ridenour –November 29, 2016
Ron Ridenour
“Fidel Castro, October 12, 1987”—that is what Fidel wrote on my book, “Yankee Sandinistas: Interviews with North Americans living and working in the new Nicaragua,” after reading it.
In 1980, I fell in love with a Danish woman, Grethe, and moved to her country. On my way to assist the rebellion in El Salvador, in 1987, we traveled to Cuba. This was my first visit to Cuba and my first book had just come out when I met Fidel.
I had given him a copy after he spoke about the legacy of Che Guevara 20 years after his murder in Bolivia. We were hundreds of Cubans, a few solidarity foreigners and journalists gathered before a newly built hospital in the Cuban province of Matanza.
My rebirth from being an American Dreamer to an internationalist occurred because of the Cuban revolution, because of what Fidel and Che taught me when I was an airman “defending” the United States against all the bad guys.
“Yankees Go Home”, “Out of Cuba”, “Cuba Si, Yankee No”. We internationalists sang and we wrote on placards we carried back and forth before the US Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, California on April 19, 1961. It was here that I joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
This was the first time I demonstrated, and here I was opposing “my” government. I had recently been discharged after four years in the United States Air Force, which I had joined at 17. What I learned in those years was the aggressor; the read bad guy was the United States. We constantly flew over and harassed Russian, Chinese and Cuban territory, yet we airmen and soldiers had orders that if “the enemy” did the same we were to shoot them down. They never did “trespass” however.
The United States murders, commits genocide and conducts thousands of military interventions and wars reign since the very beginning of its independence from Great Brittan. “Born in the USA: regimen of permanent wars” describes this sordid history.
At the top of my website are quotations, which also explain why I became an activist against US Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine and for a socialist alternative, something Fidel stood for.
“It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms,” John Stockwell, former CIA official wrote.
