Assata Shakur, terrorist and cop killer harbored by Havana since 1984, dies at 78 in Cuba

 She never renounced political violence and terrorism as methods of struggle

 

Cuba’s Foreign Ministry announced earlier today: “On September 25, 2025, U.S. citizen Joanne Deborah Byron, ‘Assata Shakur,’ passed away in Havana, Cuba, as a result of health ailments and her advanced age.” Her full name was Joanne Deborah Byron Chesimard, and she was a terrorist who escaped justice in 1979 while serving a life term for the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper.

The People’s Forum described her in a social media post as an “Anti-racist activist & freedom fighter.”

What happened in 1973?

Troopers Werner Foerster and James Harper arrested Joanne Chesimard and two of her associates on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, 1973, for a motor vehicle infraction. Unbeknownst to the troopers, all three subjects were carrying semi-automatic weapons and had fake identities. Chesimard opened fire from the front passenger seat, injuring Trooper James Harper in the shoulder. Chesimard got out of the car and kept shooting at both troopers until Harper’s return fire wounded her as she fled for cover.

Trooper Harper fatally injured James Coston, the passenger in the back seat, who also fired at the troopers. Trooper Werner Foerster and Clark Squire, the driver of the vehicle, were fighting hand-to-hand. After suffering serious injuries to his right arm and abdomen, Foerster was killed by roadside execution with his own military weapon. The jammed firearm belonging to Chesimard was discovered beside Foerster.

Forty years after the cold-blooded murder of this New Jersey state trooper, the fugitive convicted of the killing, Joanne Chesimard a.k.a. Assata Shakur, was named a Most Wanted Terrorist by the FBI, apparently the first woman ever to make the list, on May 2, 2013.

Reports by NPR and the New York Times have whitewashed what happened on May 2, 1973, but the FBI account which provides both context and an outline of what took place is damning.

Chesimard was an active, prominent member of the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army, which was described as one of the most violent militant organizations of 1970s. During this same time, the Black Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the murder of several police officers throughout the United States. On May 2, 1973, Chesimard and two accomplices were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike by Troopers James Harper and Werner Foerster for a motor vehicle violation. All three subjects possessed fictitious identification, and, unbeknownst to the troopers, all three were armed with semi-automatic handguns. From the front passenger seat, Chesimard fired the first shot, wounding Trooper James Harper in the shoulder. As Harper moved for cover, Chesimard exited the car and continued to fire at both troopers until she was wounded by Harper’s return fire.

The rear seat passenger, James Coston, also fired at the troopers and was mortally wounded by Trooper Harper. Trooper Werner Foerster was engaged in a hand-to-hand combat with the vehicle’s driver, Clark Squire. Foerster was severely wounded in his right arm and abdomen and then executed with his own service weapon on the roadside. Chesimard’s jammed handgun was found at Foerster’s side.

The three assailants returned to their car and drove down the road approximately five miles before abandoning the vehicle. Within half an hour, Chesimard was arrested by New Jersey State Troopers. Coston was found to have died near their vehicle, and Squire was found 40 hours later within a mile of their car.

Chesimard and Squire were charged, convicted, and sentenced for the murder of Trooper Werner Foerster, as well as on additional charges. Squire remains in jail. In 1979, Chesimard escaped with help from a coalition of radical, domestic terror groups who took two guards hostage during an armed assault at the facility where she was being lodged. She later fled to Cuba. Since this time, she has been classified as a federal fugitive and the subject of an unlawful flight to avoid confinement warrant.

Domestic terrorist who attacked U.S. Capitol broke Chesimard out of prison in 1979

Some more details on her escape. On November 2, 1979, Joanne Deborah Chesimard was broken out from Clinton Correctional Facility for Women by members of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force under the direction of the Black Liberation Army. Leftists over social media have celebrated the escape of this individual on the anniversary of her escape with the hashtag #AssataShakurLiberationDay.

 

 

She is not the only American woman to have links to Cuba and terrorism against the United States. Marilyn Buck engaged in terrorist actions including murdering three police in 1981 and bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1983 to protest the invasion of Grenada. Buck also helped to break Joanne Chesimard out of prison. Buck died of uterine cancer at home at age 62 on August 3, 2010. The Cuban government’s official media refer to her as an “activist and former political prisoner.”

Havana’s ideological defense of terrorism

The Castro dictatorship that harbored her continues to advocate revolutionary violence. The Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerilla by Carlos Marighella which has a chapter on terrorism and in its 1969 introduction states:

The accusation of “violence” or “terrorism” no longer has the negative meaning it used to have. It has acquired new clothing; a new color. It does not divide, it does not discredit; on the contrary, it represents a center of attraction. Today, to be “violent” or a “terrorist” is a quality that ennobles any honorable person, because it is an act worthy of a revolutionary engaged in armed struggle against the shameful military dictatorship and its atrocities.

The Cuban dictatorship published copies of the Mini-Manual in numerous languages and distributed copies worldwide in an effort to encourage urban guerrilla action and terrorism. Many on the left consider Joanne Chesimard a political prisoner because the murder of the police officer was politically motivated. However, she is not a prisoner of conscience because of the acts of violence she committed and continued to espouse until her death.

Who was Werner Foerster, the man Chesimard was found guilty of murdering?

Werner Foerster served two years and 10 months with the New Jersey State Police, and left behind his wife Rosa Charlotte Heider Foerster, and his 3 year-old son Eric. Prior to working for the police he had been a welder. Werner was just 34 years old. Both Werner and Rosa were German immigrants.

Werner Foerster with his son Eric

Today, let us remember Chesimard’s victims, and the sad fact that she evaded justice thanks to the dictatorship in Havana - that also advocated for the terrorism and political violence - leading to blood shed on American soil.

#RememberWernerFoerster

Forget Fidel Castro, Celebrate Celia Cruz

The People's Forum warmly welcomes the Cuban dictatorship’s Foreign Minister, Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla in New York City, but should be celebrating the life and legacy of Celia Cruz instead.

Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering without pain.” – Celia Cruz

The centennial of Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso's birth will be celebrated on October 21, 2025. She is better known by her stage name Celia Cruz.

Celia had agency and she decided not to bend the knee to the dictatorship. She wanted to live and perform in freedom, which meant leaving Cuba after 1959.

Fidel Castro attempted to force the salsa singer to pay him homage, but Celia refused. Salserísimo Perú, a Youtube site founded by three Peruvian journalists to disseminate knowledge on salsa and tropical music, provides a more comprehensive and accurate history than the Smithsonian Institution.

The following is an account of Celia Cruz’s first “encounter” with Fidel Castro.

“In the early months of 1959, Celia Cruz was hired to sing with a pianist at the house of the Cuban businessman Miguel Angel Quevedo. Quevedo owned the magazine Bohemia, the most influential in Cuba and who had supported the revolution in the last few years. The guerrilla movement with a certain Fidel Castro in front proclaimed in Santiago the beginning of the revolution. At that moment Celia enjoyed great popularity for “Yebero Moderno”, “Tu voz” and “Burundanga” songs she had recorded with the Sonora Matancera. As a guest artist of Rogelio Martinez’s group the Guarachera (Celia) was free to accept other contracts as a soloist. This allowed her to show her talent on different radio stations in Havana, and perform in Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru. Since the regime of Fidel took power, it had begun to systematically seize businesses, radio and television stations. [Fidel Castro speaking: ‘The revolution was something like a hope and that joy, possibly, prevented us from thinking all that we still had to do.’ For the Guarechera, Fidel was ending free expression and the arts in her country. The night of the show in the home of Quevedo, Celia was singing standing next to the pianist, when suddenly the guests started to run to the front door of the house. Fidel Castro had arrived. Neither she nor the pianist moved and continued singing. Suddenly, Quevedo approached Celia and told her that Fidel wanted to meet her because in his

guerrilla days, when he cleaned his rifle he was listening to Burundanga. Celia replied that she had been hired to sing next to the piano, and that was her place. If Fidel wanted to meet her, he would have to come to her. But the commandant did not do that.”

Castro barred Celia Cruz from visiting her dying mother 

Since Celia Cruz refused to bow to the new dictator, and wanted to continue to live the life of a free artist, she had to leave Cuba on July 15, 1960. However, when her mom was ill she tried to return to see her in 1962, but was barred from entering the country by Fidel Castro. When her mother died Celia was again blocked by the dictatorship from attending her funeral. Because she was not an active supporter of the regime, her music was banned in Cuba.

She was finally able to return to Cuba in 1990, but not on territory controlled by the Castro dictatorship, when she played a concert for Cuban employees who worked on the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base, and collected Cuban soil that would be entombed with her in 2003.

Music still banned in Cuba today

Regime apologists and their agents of influence have attempted to pretend that things have changed with regards to artistic freedom.

On August 8, 2012 BBC News reported that Cuba’s ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted and on August 10 the BBC correspondent in Cuba, Sarah Rainsford, tweeted that she had been given names of forbidden artists by the central committee and the internet was a buzz that the ban on anti-Castro musicians had been quietly lifted. Others soon followed reporting on the news. The stories specifically mentioned Celia Cruz as one of the artists whose music would return to Cuban radio.

There was only one problem. It was not true. Diario de Cuba reported on August 21, 2012 that Tony Pinelli, a well known musician and radio producer, distributed an e-mail in which Rolando Álvarez, the national director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (ICRT) confirmed that the music of the late Celia Cruz would continue to be banned. The e-mail clearly stated: “All those who had allied with the enemy, who acted against our families, like Celia Cruz, who went to sing at the Guantanamo Base, the ICRT arrogated to itself the right, quite properly, not to disseminate them on Cuban radio ”

Celia is in good company. Other major Cuban artists who have had their music banned by the Castro regime are Olga Guillot, Rolando Lecuona, Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Israel Cachao López, Ramón “Mongo” Santamaría, Mario Bauza, Arsenio Rodríguez, Willy Chirino, and Gloria Estefan.

Cuban cultural genocide

According to the 2004 book Shoot the Singer!: Music Censorship Today edited by Marie Korpe, there is growing concern that post-revolution generations in Cuba are growing up without knowing or hearing censored musicians such as Celia Cruz, Olga Guillot, and the long list above. This could lead to a loss of Cuban identity in future generations. This approach has been referred to as a Cuban cultural genocide, denying generations of Cubans their history.

Communists are celebrating the centenary of the birth of Fidel Castro with a series of propaganda stunts over the next year. They should be called out and fact checked.

One of these stunts was carried out by the People's Forum in New York City on September 21, 2025, and was an effort to whitewash the racist legacy of the Cuban dictatorship.

The People’s Forum, September 21, 2025 on X

In September 1960 Fidel Castro met with Malcolm X in Harlem, and this past Sunday the People’s Forum sought to celebrate this encounter and host Bruno Rodriguez, the foreign minister of the Cuban dictatorship.

Left out of the celebration was the anti-Black legacy of the Cuban revolution that continues to reverberate to the present day in Cuba.

Castro’s communist revolution ended Black Cuban's agency in Cuba.

This was known by 1961 when Cuban black nationalist Juan René Betancourt in his essay, "Castro and the Cuban Negro", published in the NAACP publication The Crisis in 1961 detailed how it was done.

“Of the 256 Negro societies in Cuba, many have had to close their doors and others are in death agony. One can truthfully say, and this is without the slightest exaggeration, that the Negro movement in Cuba died at the hands of Sr. Fidel Castro.” … “Yet this is the man who had the cynical impudence to visit the United States in 1960 for the purpose of censuring American racial discrimination. Although this evil obviously exists in the United States, Castro is not precisely the man to offer America solutions, nor even to pass judgement.”

Between 1898 and 1959 the relationship between Black-Americans and Black-Cubans was based on their being part of an international black diaspora. This relationship ended when the Castro regime ended autonomous black civil society in 1962, and consolidated totalitarian rule.

It was replaced by Castro and his white revolutionary elite allying with Black elites in the United States, and Africa while criticizing racism in the United States.

For decades, the Castro regime expected Black Cubans to be obedient, submissive, and grateful to the white revolutionary elite, and this was reflected in official propaganda with racist tropes. 

Castro regime's publication Verde Olivo 1, no. 29 (October 1, 1960)

The elimination of Afro-Cubans from this dynamic by the new communist revolutionary elite turned racism into a political tool outside of Cuba to advance the Castro regime's communist agenda, but turned it into a taboo topic by ungrateful blacks, labeled counter-revolutionaries by the dictatorship.

Black Cubans who think for themselves are still punished today, and often with greater severity than their white counterparts.

Cuban blacks today that would have been political leaders in the 1940s and 1950s are dissidents persecuted, hunted and killed by the secret police.

Based on the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, according to the January 13, 2020 article by EuropaPress, Cuba today has the largest per capita prison population in the world. Although official data is unavailable, it is known that a disproportionate number are Black Cubans.

On March 22, 1959 Fidel Castro declared that racism no longer existed in Cuba, to question that was to be a counter-revolutionary. The regime claimed over the next six decades that there is no racism in Cuba while poverty disproportionately impacts black Cubans with 95% having the lowest incomes compared to 58% of white Cubans, after six decades of communism, and independent black voices continue to be silenced.

An opportunity next month to counter The Peoples Forum's and Castroism's lies. 

However, next month supporters of freedom and beautiful music should commemorate Celia Cruz’s entire life and legacy through her music, and words.

Speaking up for jailed Cuban artists today, who Celia would have spoken up for their freedom if she were alive today, such as prisoners of conscience Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.

Cuba’s Eternal Night premieres in Washington DC tonight (September 18, 2025) at 6:30pm

Cuba’s Eternal Night (La noche eterna de Cuba)

Directed by Jordan Allott

United States

2025

66 mins

 

What happened in Cuba two years after the glorious national rebellion of July 11, 2021, which was brutally crushed by the regime with violence and repression?

Those who miraculously escaped imprisonment and persecution speak courageously before the camera in a country that is sinking, with no glimmer of hope except for the desperate urge to flee, by any means necessary. A bankrupt society, abandoned to its fate, without the solidarity or support of the nationals and foreigners who once placed their faith in a doomed and corrupt ideology.

Cuba’s Eternal Night follows 5 Cubans over the span of 2 years as they struggle with government repression, scarcity of food and medicine, and the biggest mass exodus the island has ever experienced.

Film followed by Q&A session

Expected guests

Jordan Allott

Director, Writer

 

 

Biographies

Jordan Allot

Jordan Allott is a documentary filmmaker and founder of In Altum Productions (IAP). With over 35 countries on his filmmaking resume—from China and Syria to Nigeria and Cuba—his work explores themes ranging from international human rights and American politics to Catholic spirituality.


Luis Alvarez

Videography, Audio tech, Certified Drone Operator
Born in Bogota, Colombia, Luis studied film directing at the New York Film Academy. Luis’s extensive production experience includes working with IAP for over 12 years. Traveled to Cuba to carry out interviews for Cuba’s Eternal Night documentary.

 

Yoe Suárez 

Yoe Suárez is a writer, producer, and journalist, exiled from Cuba due to his investigative reporting about themes like torture, political prisoners, government black lists, cybersurveillance, and freedom of expression and conscience. He is the author of the books “Leviathan: Political Police and Socialist Terror” and “El Soplo del Demonio: Violence and Gangsterism in Havana.”

Ariadna Mena Rubio

 

Ariadna Mena Rubio is a long time Cuban human rights activist, and labor union activist, who suffered detentions and harassment from Cuba's secret police. In Cuba she was a member of the  Confederación de Trabajadores Independiente de Cuba (CTIC) and the Asociación Sindical Independiente de Cuba (ASIC).  Prior to being exiled, she had traveled outside of Cuba to denounce the human rights situation in the island, and returned home to the island. She appears in the documentary, Cuba’s Eternal Night, where her odyssey to obtain asylum in the United States is highlighted.

John Suarez

 

John Suarez is a human rights activist and executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba and a former program officer for Latin America Programs at Freedom House.

Tickets available here: https://eventbrite.com/e/dc-premiere-of-cubas-eternal-night-la-noche-eterna-de-cuba-tickets-1645390470189 

 Visit the documentary's website here: https://cubaseternalnight.com

Why the UK's victory in the Battle of Britain makes the International Day of Democracy today possible

"Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." - Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (1948)

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the greatest Briton

 

Today the United Nations is observing International Day of  Democracy and the United Kingdom is observing Battle of Britain Day. It is fair to say if the British Democracy had not triumphed over Nazi Germany in that great battle, then we would not have an International Day of Democracy, and the past 80 years would be very different.  

 

This double observance heightens the importance of remembering the wisdom of Winston Churchill and honor the man who twice saved democracy from Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.  

 

Today in 1940, the Battle of Britain's most decisive clash saw the Royal Air Force repel the largest Luftwaffe air strike against the United Kingdom. Months earlier on June 18, 1940 in a speech in The House of Commons titled "Their Finest Hour" Prime Minister Churchill explained the stakes of World War II and the start of the existential clash for Great Britain: 

I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

It is shocking in 2025 that some today claim that it was a mistake to go to war against Nazi Germany, and attempt to white wash the profound evil of Hitler's regime in Berlin. 

 

At the same time the apologists for international communism like to extol their so-called "antifascist"credentials while remaining silent or finding bizarre revisionist explanations on the connections between fascism and communism that Mr. Churchill succinctly outlined in the quote at the top of the page. 

 

Of equal concern is the attempt to deny the fact that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin signed a pact in August of 1939, that secretly included the division of Central and Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, that started World War II. 

 

This alliance lasted until the summer of 1941 when Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet union. Consider for a moment that it was Britain and France who honoring their alliance declared war on Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939 when Poland was invaded by Hitler's Third Reich. 

 

Churchill did not equivocate and in a radio address on October 1, 1939 described the Russian's role as invaders along with the Nazis days after.

 "Poland has been again overrun by two of the great Powers which held her in bondage for 150 years, but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defense of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible, and that she will rise again like a rock, which may for a spell be submerged by a tidal wave, but which remains a rock."

Britain and France were convinced that Russia and Germany were allies and plans were drawn up to attack Russian oil fields in order to deny them to the Nazis in what became known in the planning stages as Operation Pike.  Months later the reversals continued for Christendom. The Fall of France to the Nazi war machine took place between May 10 and June 25, 1940 over the span of 46 days ending in the evacuation of Dunkirk. This disaster is what led to Operation Pike being scrapped.

The British Empire was alone for almost a year between June 25, 1940 through June 22, 1941 as the sole main resistance to Nazi Germany. The United States would remain neutral until Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the Soviet Union was a de facto ally of Nazi Germany until Hitler invaded communist Russia on June 22, 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. The United Kingdom was all that stood between the survival of Christian civilization and a new Dark Age that Adolf Hitler called the Thousand Year Reich. If one is truly Anti-Nazi then one must celebrate and honor the legacy of Winston Churchill, who early on identified the Nazi threat and issued calls to to resistance with one of the most important in a radio address to London and the United States on October 16, 1938.

"Dictatorship – the fetish worship of one man – is a passing phase. A state of society where men may not speak their minds, where children denounce their parents to the police, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions; such a state of society cannot long endure if brought into contact with the healthy outside world. The light of civilised progress with its tolerances and co-operation, with its dignities and joys, has often in the past been blotted out. But I hold the belief that we have now at last got far enough ahead of barbarism to control it, and to avert it, if only we realise what is afoot and make up our minds in time. We shall do it in the end. But how much harder our toil for every day’s delay! Is this a call to war? Does anyone pretend that preparation for resistance to aggression is unleashing war? I declare it to be the sole guarantee of peace. We need the swift gathering of forces to confront not only military but moral aggression; the resolute and sober acceptance of their duty by the English-speaking peoples and by all the nations, great and small, who wish to walk with them."

Four years earlier on November 16, 1934, after the Nazis had just been in power a little over two years Winston Churchill warned of their threat to peace:

There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtue, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by parliament, or by public opinion. In that country all pacifist speeches, all morbid war books are forbidden or suppressed, and their authors rigorously imprisoned. From their new table of commandments they have omitted “thou shall not kill.”

Sadly the world did not listen to Churchill until it was too late to avoid a major conflict, but at least it was not too late to stop the Nazi war machine although it came at great cost and suffering. Churchill understood that to defeat Hitler the Soviet Union would have to change sides and when the Nazis invaded Russia the British Prime Minister joked, "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The price of ending Hitler was cozying up to Josef Stalin, another genocidal totalitarian monster.

Churchill was not blind to the nature of his wartime ally and understood the threat of Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union and thankfully his warnings on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri were listened to this time and may have avoided World War III, albeit with a cold peace.

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow." 

He then went on to make a remarkable statement about the circumstances that led to World War II and how it was completely avoidable:

Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again.

Churchill was not only an Anti-Nazi but also an Anti-Communist and a conservative who on May 24, 1948 observed: "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy." 

He also understood and celebrated the importance of free speech. In the midst of the war in 1943 he observed: 

"Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."  

Today let us remember this great statesman, democrat, and conservative and call on all people of good will to learn form this greatest of Britons. His moral clarity, and the victory in the Battle of Britain 85 years ago, makes possible the celebration of the International Day of Democracy.

 

Feast Day for Cuba's Our Lady Charity, the founding of the Christian Liberation Movement and the importance of truth

“María, Faro de la Libertad / Mary, Beacon of Freedom,” - Archdiocese of Miami

Virgin of Charity and the three Juanes

For the past four centuries, since the Virgin of Charity appeared to the three Juanes in the Bay of Nipe in 1612, She has been a source of popular devotion among Cubans and on May 10, 1916 forever linked with Cuban independence when Pope Benedict XV proclaimed Her Patroness of Cuba in response to a request by veterans of the Cuban war of independence. Since then She has also been known as the Virgin Mambisa. 

Since 1959 She has accompanied the Cuban diaspora.

The Virgin of Charity has remained a powerful force in Cuba over the past 65 years, despite efforts to impose atheism.

Jesús Mustafá Felipe at Solemn Mass for Our Lady of Charity

37 years ago on September 8, 1988, the Feast Day for Cuba's Our Lady Charity, a handful of Cubans, lay Catholics, consisting of Oswaldo Payá, Ramón Antúnez, Dagoberto Capote, Santiago Cárdenas and Fernando Arvelo, inspired by their faith, the strength of their ideals and love for their country, founded the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), to work for the recovery of popular sovereignty and national reconciliation in Cuba.

 "Liberation is our purpose, liberation carried out by the people, who will not be a spectator of the moment in which their destiny is decided. We do not call all against each other, but all for a new Cuba. We reject violence, offense, lies and destruction as means of struggle. We do not believe that the end justifies the means. Our goal is to achieve freedom, justice and this is achieved only moved by love. Freedom is true only if it emanates from love. "

 Since then, many Cubans joined the Christian Liberation Movement and given their best for their homeland. Some are no longer physically here, and some of them were murdered by the dictatorship.

37° aniversario de la fundación del Movimiento Cristiano Liberación 8 de septiembre de 1988 pic.twitter.com/ucn8OKS98X

— MCLcubaoficial (@mclcubaoficial) September 1, 2025

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas described how the Christian Liberation Movement, a democratic opposition movement, came into existence and explained how it was related to the birth of his first child, Oswaldo José.

“When our first child was going to be born, we have three children, we said that our children cannot live in a country without liberty and we are not going to another country to seek freedom. Therefore we have to fight for our children to live free here in Cuba and everyone else's children and their parents too.”    

Oswaldo José was born on February 17, 1988 and the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) was founded that same year on September 8, 1988.   Oswaldo Payá was killed on July 22, 2012 along with the movement's youth leader Harold Cepero. 

The Castro dictatorship has a hostile relationship with religion since the beginning when it officially declared itself an atheist state and expelled scores of priests from Cuba on September 17, 1961, canceled Christmas in 1969 under the pretext to prevent work shortages for the 1970 ten million ton sugar harvest but continued the ban until 1997, and sent mobs to intimidate Cubans attending religious services.

Priests were taken at gun point and forced out of Cuba in 1961

 This is not what was promised by the revolutionaries when they took power in Cuba.  Fidel Castro on January 11, 1959 went  on Face the Nation and promised free, multiparty elections within 18 months. Richard Bate of CBS News pressed the Cuban dictator.

Richard Bate: Dr. Castro you said that in 18 months or so there will be free elections in Cuba. When this time comes will all political parties be able to run candidates in these elections?

Fidel Castro: Yes, of course

Richard Bate: All political parties including the Directorio?

Fidel Castro: Of course, if we don't give free to all the political parties to organize we are not a democratic country. We have fought for the democracy here, and for the free ... for the the freedom of our people. We don't want to stop and to put any difficulties to anybody. We believe in democracy. 

Richard Bate: Why would it be necessary to wait 18 months before free elections to be held?

Fidel Castro: Well, do you think it is good for the Cubans When all the people want peace. When all the people is that the government repair the mistakes and the barbarity of the before government. Don't you believe that our country at least one year to work? Do you believe that between... in the fight of the political parties is it possible to do anything? If we give a free election tomorrow we win because we have almost all the people ...

In Matthew 7:15-7:16 the Gospel states "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits." From the very beginning, truth has often been a casualty of the communist regime in Cuba.

Father Miguel Angel Loredo (1998)

 

Father Miguel Angel Loredo was a prisoner of conscience of the Castro dictatorship because he refused to go along with the lies of the regime. Father Loredo understood that one of the most formidable weapons against injustice is objective truth, and here he explained why.

"I believe we should denounce the evils of both the right and the left. I find selective denunciation, that has political roots repugnant. If you believe in the integrity of the human being you must believe deeply in objective denunciation. Without objectivity, there is no hope."

Monsignor Agustin Roman in an essay on the importance of the Cuban dissident movement in Cuba described the role that the truth played in its genesis:

The concept of nonviolent civil resistance is introduced into the history of Cuba. Take the truth as a weapon, placing it in practice in the civic field, what Scripture proposed in the spiritual realm: "the truth shall make you free". Hence its importance at that time and its transcendence for the future of Cuba.

If the truth shall make you free then what does the lie offer? The Ochoa case offers a dramatic answer. In June of 1989, General Arnaldo Ochoa is arrested. 

He had been declared a “Hero of the Revolution” by Fidel Castro in 1984 but by 1989 was deemed too dangerous by Castro because he feared that General Ochoa had been contaminated by the ideas of Glasnost and Perestroika while visiting the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era. 

He was also popular within the ranks of the military due to his exploits in Africa. General Ochoa was accused of conspiracy and treason. He was also tied to drug smuggling and corruption. Ochoa was approached by Fidel Castro with the offer that if he confessed to everything he had been accused of and did not mount a vigorous defense that he could go home into retirement.

General Ochoa  went along with the lie and pled guilty in an abject fashion reminiscent Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. He was executed days later by firing squad on July 13, 1989, with a tainted reputation.

Father José Conrado and Father Juan Lázaro Vélez officiate at Mass for Matanzas victims

During a special mass for the victims of the Matanzas oil fire in Miami on September 6, 2022, Father Conrado acknowledged that "although we are far from the Homeland, those of us who left to find freedom, also feel and suffer for Cuba, because the Homeland belongs to everyone" paraphrasing José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence. Father Conrado issued a call in the name of Jesus and the Virgin "so that we Cubans break the spell of evil that has taken over the island" and for this he called for the unity of all Cubans, "those of the two shores”.

¡Virgen de la Caridad, ruega por nosotros!

Our Lady of Charity, pray for us! pic.twitter.com/duDN3MxQA8

— Archdiocese of Miami (@CatholicMiami) September 8, 2025

On September 7th, at 5:00 pm, Christian Liberation Movement members met at 800 West 29th Street, Hialeah, where they presented a wreath at the monument erected in memory of Oswaldo Paya and commemorate the 37th anniversary of the founding of the Christian Liberation Movement, to which he dedicated his life. 

Christian Liberation Movement members in Hialeah on September 7th.

Today is a also good day to remember Václav Havel's hopeful call: "May truth and love triumph over lies and hatred." 

May it be so.