Mon, April 19th at 6 p.m. on Bringing Light Into Darkness:
This past week former Attorney General Ramsey Clark passed away. During his tenure as Attorney General of the United States from 1967-1969 under LBJ, he was instrumental in promoting voting rights for African Americans, school desegregation and drafted the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968, (Fair Housing Act. As the most progressive Attorney General in U.S. history, his world view evolved rapidly as a result of revelations regarding the Vietnam War, and he became one of our greatest antiwar activists. We highlight a speech in which he claims the most powerfully true words that Dr King ever said was that the US “was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. He believed that to still be the case right up to his death. We critically examine that and other words of MLK’s Beyond Vietnam speech. In the show’s introduction.
The primary focus of the show is a detailed analysis and historical account of and on the 60th anniversary of the April 1961 US Bay of Pigs invasion and defeat, the first defeat in the long history of US invasion interventions in the western hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs history we have been influenced by comes mainly from US foreign policy perspective that is often spoken from the veterans of the invasion force. It often claims it was the failure of promised air support from US that was decisive in the defeat. But what is ignored is that the overwhelming Cuban ‘public opinion’ then as is true today is that the majority population of Cuba supports the Cuban Model. It begs the question with regard to the “Cuban opposition’ to the Cuban government, Without U.S. Funding Would There Be Anything to Fund?
We show tonight the reductionist ahistorical representation that the US failed air support argument suggests. I traveled to Cuba a half dozen times and visited the Bay of Pigs 4-5 times during the last 20 years. I befriended Cubans including ones that were present at the Bay of Pigs during the invasion. Researching this subject over the last 20 years or so reveals an amazing story about the Cuban Revolution that we have been indoctrinated to largely be ignorant of. Check out this BLID show tonight for a honest and comprehensive rendition of that history and the war heroes that span from citizen militias to Fidel Castro himself. Don’t be Late.