Jeremiah Wright's Cuban Friends

Barack Obama insists that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not his political mentor, but upon examining Wright's attacks on American foreign policy, it is difficult to imagine that Obama's own foreign policy, including his willingness to meet with Cuban leader, Fidel Castro and Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmidinajed, has not been influenced by Rev Wright's political ideology.

The following excerpts, detailing Rev. Wright's visit to Cuba in 1984, give us further insight into Mr. Wright's perverse ideologies:

From the Miami Press - Was it remotely conceivable that someone with Jeremiah’s Wright’s worldview and connections had somehow avoided a pilgrimage to the world capitol of Yankee-hatred, to worship and commiserate with its high priests?

Not a chance. Reverend Wright was part of Revered Jesse Jackson’s 300 person entourage to Havana in 1984. “Viva Fidel!” bellowed Reverend Jackson while concluding his speech at the University of Havana. “Viva Che Guevara!..Long Live our cry of Freedom!”

As mentioned, this was summer of 1984, so at the time the world’s longest-suffering black political prisoner suffered his incarceration and tortures in stoic defiance. “Nigger!” taunted his jailers between tortures. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!”

I do not refer to Nelson Mandela. No, this prisoner was being tortured a few miles away from the Revs. Jackson, Wright and their entourage of black American luminaries. The prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Penalver and he was being tortured by Reverend Wright’s gracious hosts.

Mr Penalver’s incarceration and tortures stretched to 29 years which makes him the longest-suffering black political prisoner in modern history, surpassing Nelson Mandela’s record in time behind bars and probably doubling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.

Eusebio Penalver was bloodied in his fight with Castroism but unbowed for almost 30 years in its dungeons.

“For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell,” Eusebio recalls. “That’s 4 feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.”

Shortly before his death in 2006, Senor Penalver told this writer, “Castro’s apologists, those who excuse or downplay his crimes– these people be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious whatever–they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant’s crimes, accomplices in the most brutal and murderous regime in the hemisphere...”

...Jackson and Wright’s Cuban pilgrimage was arranged by the Cuban Council of Churches, who sprang for the full $300,000 tab. “ I have been affiliated with the Cuba Council of Churches since the 1980s,” boasted Reverend Jeremiah Wright in a sermon just last year. “I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project’s trips to Cuba.” And naturally the kicker: “Our denomination’s Global Ministries is committed to calling for an end to the U.S. sanctions against Cuba.”

This same denomination, needless to add, clamored FOR sanctions against South Africa.

The Cuban Council of Churches, according to Cuban intelligence defector, Juan Vives, is an arm of Cuba’s ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba’s DGI, Cuba’s secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI.

The ICAP’s long-time chieftain was Rene Cruz Rodriguez whose meteoric rise through Cuba’s Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out Che Guevara and Raul Castro themselves in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim’s skull with a coup d’ grace from his .45.

Courtesy of Cuban-American professor, Tony de la Cova, we have dramatic proof of how some of Jeremiah Wright’s “close friends” distinguished themselves as Cuban Revolutionaries. Read in full.