The president’s stop at Ebenezer is ostensibly an official trip, not a political one. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference on voting rights in Washington on Monday, the federal holiday that observes King’s birthday. Biden will follow his Ebenezer appearance by attending the Rev. King, the civil rights leader assassinated in 1968 after he fueled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, would have celebrated his 94th birthday on Sunday. “Even though Fidel Castro did it,” said Sanders, “it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad.“The president has been very clear that voting, the right to vote, the access to vote is a core component of our democracy,” Bottoms said. Sanders has a decades-long history of praising Castro.

Is that a bad thing?” Sanders said, not noting that Cuba already had the highest literacy rate in Latin America before the revolution, and opponents of his communist government say his literacy program was really just a disguised indoctrination program. “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Bernie Sanders, (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist, made headlines earlier this year when cited communist propaganda during a 60 Minutes interview praising Castro. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and the world around him.” In a carefully worded statement neither praising nor condemning Castro, he said “we know that this moment fills Cubans – in Cuba and in the United States – with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and the Cuban nation. President Barack Obama was more measured. Some prominent Democrats and progressive leaders even praised the dictator.įormer President Jimmy Carter said at the time that he and his wife Rosalynn “remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country.”Ĭongresswoman Karen Bass (D-Calif.), in a prepared statement, called Castro’s death a “great loss to the people of Cuba.”Ĭanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went further, calling Castro a “larger than life leader” who “made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” Warnock was not alone in 2016 in failing to condemn Castro. If both win, Democrats will take over the Senate. Warnock is one of two Democrats in Georgia trying to defeat Republican incumbents in a January runoff election. His campaign has said he was not involved in inviting Castro to the church.

Warnock was a youth pastor at Abyssinian at the time. Warnock’s Republican opponents also have turned attention to his connection to a speech Castro gave in 1995 at Warnock’s former church, Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.Īccording to a Miami Herald report, Castro “blast the United States with vigor,” and finished the “the evening with a rousing rendition of the socialist hymn Internationale.” The regime also imprisoned thousands of political opponents, and drove a million Cubans into exile. Castro’s regime likely killed tens of thousands of people, though exact numbers aren’t clear. “Many of us have sisters and brothers who are political prisoners.”Ĭastro and his communist revolutionaries took over the island nation on New Year’s Day 1959 and quickly impoverished the country, turning it into a one-party dictatorship with a gulag. “If some people get slapped on the hand for the same crime and others go to federal prison, then we too have our own political prisons,” said Warnock, who has said America’s overuse of prisons is the nation’s most pressing civil rights problem. Warnock then compared America’s criminal justice system to communist Cuba’s history of taking political prisoners. Kind of like America’s legacy is complex.” “Don’t let anybody tell you a simple story,” Warnock told parishioners. Speaking from the pulpit two days after Castro’s November 2016 death, Warnock prayed for the people of Cuba, and said “we remember Fidel Castro, whose legacy is complex.” Raphael Warnock is being accused of giving a pass to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro upon his death in 2016, calling the murderous tyrant “complex,” and comparing his legacy to America’s, in recently unearthed video from the time.

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