Revelations about Bill de Blasio’s jaunts to communist Cuba and Nicaragua aren’t sitting well with those who battled — and fled — those countries’ repressive regimes.
“I think he ought to be quiet about that,” said retired US Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, who aided anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua as part of the 1980s Iran-Contra affair.
“People who supported the Sandinistas were doing so in violation of the announced policy of the United States.”
The Democratic public advocate and mayoral front-runner was an “admirer” of the communist Sandinistas and traveled to Nicaragua at the age of 26 to distribute food and medicine in 1988, The New York Times reported Monday.
A member of the National Association of Cuban-American Women also blasted de Blasio’s honeymoon in Cuba.
“Fidel Castro killed a lot of people in my country in the ’60s and ’70s. When you are against him, he will do something against you,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she still has relatives living in the nation.
Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota said de Blasio’s globe-hopping to countries battling the US showed “it’s pretty obvious we think very, very differently about the way the governments of the world should work.”
“I believe actions taken like the Sandinistas, who were fighting Americans as well as capitalism, was absolutely not the right thing to do during the Cold War,” he said.
The former MTA chief also noted that de Blasio “in his own words, he called himself a democratic socialist.”
Independence Party candidate Adolfo Carrión went even further, labeling de Blasio a “radical without a clue.”
De Blasio called his opponents’ criticisms “a right-wing tactic,” saying, “The reason I got involved in this work from the beginning was I saw inequalities, I saw unfairness.”