Years ago, I spoke with a Cuban who had fled the island. We chatted politics, a little baseball and music. He made an interesting observation: Castro denied me the Beatles!
Most lefties, and their apologists in Hollywood and elsewhere, do not know, or choose to overlook, that Castro did not allow Cubans to listen to the Beatles, rock music or American movies. All of these things were hailed as capitalist trash that would poison the minds of revolutionaries.
This is why so many of us reacted with anger when Carlos Santana showed up wearing a Che jersey during the awards a few years ago.
Myriam Marquez wrote this in the Orlando Sentinel:
"Grammy-winning jazz great, Paquito D'Rivera, a worldwide talent who fled Cuba in the 1980s, apparently weighed in this week with an "open letter" to Santana.Che Guevarra was a man who put many to death. He confiscated private property for no reason at all.
He noted that wearing Che's face is "a harsh blow" because Cuban youth in the 1960s "had to go into hiding to listen to your albums, which the Revolution and the troglodyte Argentinean and his cohorts, dubbed as 'imperialist music.' "
In the end, he was captured because the Bolivian natives did not support him. Che's Bolivian revolution was a huge failure! Che Guevarra and Fidel Castro turned Cuba into a political prison.
Last but not least, he was part of a dictatorship that did not allow Cuban youths to listen to Santana's music.
Maybe Hollywood will make a movie called "the dissident's diaries", the story of young Cuban who was put in jail for listening to Santana and believing in democracy.