Vote totals do not include Alaska and Colorado, where only one party voted.
Results do include, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia. These are mostly southern states, where the GOP traditionally dominates.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders won the popular vote in seven of ten states where both Democrats and Republicans participated on Super Tuesday March 1, 2016
Hillary Clinton crushed Super Tuesday. She gathered the most votes in Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Virginia.
Bernie Sanders got the most votes in Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont.
Trump took the most votes in Alabama and Tennessee. That’s it. These are Confederate states, people.
Ted Cruz got the most votes in Texas.
So: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against all the other candidates, both Democratic and Republican, in four states; Bernie Sanders won three; Donald Trump won two; Ted Cruz won one.
The media would make us think Donald Trump is unstoppable. Don’t believe it.
They would tell us Marco Rubio can be a contender. Don’t believe it. He placed a distant fifth, and he failed to win the popular vote in any state, though he won the GOP vote in Minnesota, where Bernie Sanders smothered him by garnering three times his vote total.
In this conservative GOP leaning group of ten states, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders combined to win almost half the total votes cast. This total includes the votes of all the candidates, even Kasich and Carson, as well as several others. The bottom line is this: Hillary received 1.2 million more votes than did Trump in the most politically conservative region of the United States.
She came in second in Texas behind Ted Cruz, where she collected a million votes. Trump fell to a distant third. In fact, in those states that Hillary didn’t win outright, she placed second in every single one except Vermont, where Bernie Sanders got 86% of the vote.
The GOP is in serious trouble. Either Clinton or Sanders (the two Democrats) won the popular vote in seven of the ten states.
Donald Trump is dis-assembling the GOP before our very eyes. This take-down is historic. When it’s over, some say, the GOP will be gone and a new third party will emerge. Billionaires, like New York State’s Michael Bloomberg, have already predicted it. The meltdown of a major political party like the GOP hasn’t happened in any of our lifetimes. History suggests that any third party will be weaker than the party it replaces.
We are going to have a lot of angry people on the right, who are armed to the teeth. History suggests violence is possible. I really hope people will remember that we live in a constitutional republic with democratic elections. Because we are free and brave, violence has no place in our decision-making process.
Billy Lee
Post Script:Click on this link to review Super Tuesday election results. The Editorial Board.
Results of the 2016 New Hampshire Primary Election.
Total votes cast: 534,860.
Independent candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (who are running as Democrat and Republican, ostensibly) gathered 47% of the total vote in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Add in the votes for the life-long Democrat, Hillary Clinton, and the total reaches 65%.
What’s the point? Think about it. Less than 35% of the vote went to traditional GOP candidates.
In 2012, Barack Obama received 49,080 votes in the New Hampshire Primary. Mitt Romney, the Republican winner, got 97,591.
Consider this: in the 2012 New Hampshire Primary, voters cast 309,000 ballots — less than 58% of this year’s total (535,000). In that earlier primary Mitt Romney received 31.6% of the votes; Barack Obama, just 15.9%.
Here’s another way to make the point: back in 2012 over 80% of the ballots cast fell to traditional Republican candidates.
Historically, the New Hampshire Primary doesn’t do well predicting the eventual presidential winner, but it can be viewed as a canary in the coal mine for national trends in the electorate. Yesterday, a canary fell off its perch. The GOP is in trouble.
In the New Hampshire primary where less than 20% of the voters cast ballots for Democrats in 2012, nearly half did so in 2016. The increase in turnout for Democrats was astounding.
The Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board endorses Hillary Clinton for president.
Faithful readers of the Billy Lee Pontificator should find it no surprise that its Editorial Board — in a unanimous decision — agreed to endorse Hillary Clinton to be the next president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton’s opponents are ideologues, every single one of them. They seem to be blind to the immensity, complexity, and diversity that is the United States of America. Their ideological filters drive them to say things that appear foolish, even crazy, to the many people who don’t live inside their own bubbles.
Rigid thinkers can really screw-up a country like the United States. Look at what the Bush family did to America. Every last one of them loves our country. But they are wealthy conservative-activists who during the past forty years pushed our intelligence community toward a strategy designed to make the world safer for billionaires and their friends. They seem to have forgotten about everyone else. It has been an unmitigated disaster.
To get their way they seem to have encouraged citizens to adopt patterns of rigid thinking — both on the left and the right — because somewhere someone convinced them — maybe in the intelligence community (who knows?) — that ideologues are easier to manipulate.
Whatever is fanning the flames of extremism on both sides of the nearly perfect 50/50 political divide, it hasn’t worked out so well, certainly not for regular folks. We need leadership with an appropriate vision of what’s fair and right in a democracy.
At the Billy Lee Pontificator we are mixed-economy advocates; we believe in Capitalism and Socialism competing side by side to provide best-in-class solutions for people’s aspirations.
It is well-known that we support limits to personal incomes as well as caps on the size of family estates, because quite simply, if we don’t have limits — and they can be very high limits and do no harm — a handful of families end up owning and running everything, like they already seem to do.
Without International limits — until the world agrees to make excessive possession of wealth a felony (not only in the United States, but everywhere) — billionaires will continue to pour their resources into their own families and bases of power; they will continue to distort and corrupt our democratic institutions and make life for average people a living hell, especially during recessions, which billionaires survive quite well, thank you.
Average people like myself and almost everyone I know expect to live in democracy and freedom; we expect a good living; we are endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator, the Declaration of Independence tells us. It’s why we cooperate to build a society, a country, a system that doesn’t emulate the jungle — where our ancestors lived, by the way, and didn’t do well.
Socialism by itself demoralizes innovators, some have said. It might be true (billionaires seem to work overtime to make it appear true), but (will anyone admit it?) Capitalism can diminish the lives of average, less capable people by humiliating them; it can drive them into un-gated neighborhoods, even ghettoes, and exclude them from educational and recreational opportunities and almost every other advantage of living that civilized society is supposed to provide.
Poor people have a tough time under the high-heels of Capitalism; most of the poor are children, who have no responsibility for their lack of the things which mark the lives of the privileged.
If anyone wants to understand the difference between the rich and the poor, they might abandon their comfort zone for a day to visit an elementary school in an impoverished neighborhood; then visit a school in a wealthy neighborhood. The difference will bring tears to the eyes of any human who has a loving heart beating inside them.
Let’s face facts. Most people in America are poor and below average. Even among the middle-class and the above-average almost no one can run a four-minute mile or invent the Internet or manage a company. Most people struggle to balance their budgets or even to understand how their government works. It has been this way in every civilized country since the beginning of civilization, and it always will be.
Despite our efforts to shield ourselves from the truth, the facts are that a huge number of people endure physical, mental, and emotional limitations that prevent them from securing a safe and comfortable life inside the United States. Don’t look around too carefully. People have stopped coming here.
More people are leaving the USA than are coming — at least from Mexico — according to the PEW Research Center. That WALL Trump wants to build might be used someday to keep people from fleeing. It could someday turn the USA into the world’s biggest prison.
Smart, energetic people earn rewards in every country in the world. The difference in America is that the advantaged live in an invisible world hidden behind walls and gates where anyone who is poor and disadvantaged and stupid enough to try to visit will find themselves blocked and disgraced; possibly even arrested.
The United States deserves to elect leaders who want to make America both fair and free; to make it a place where the advantages of being clever are good, but not excessive to the point of absurdity; where the disadvantages of powerlessness do not lead to humiliation and despair.
And let’s not close our eyes to the canary in the coal mine of New Hampshire. This past Tuesday Hillary Rodham Clinton received 57% more votes than the total of all Democrats combined four years ago. She received 95,252 votes in 2016; all Democrats in 2012: 60,659.
Another factor to consider, and some may find it disappointing: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump cannot win a national election. Why?
Bernie is a self-proclaimed socialist. Some young people embrace socialism it seems, but it’s a bridge too far for many, probably most Americans. It’s a bridge too far for me and my Editorial Board.
We embrace social-medicine, yes, and other socialized programs like fire and police protection, water and sewer services; public schools; libraries and on and so on.
Certainly our financial system has become a sink-hole for the wealthy, who are known to have swallowed whole the earnings and retirement savings of many unsuspecting people unawares. Maybe reducing the risk to the public from the banking sector by setting up an honest system of public administration is a good way to go.
But we also know in our hearts that people like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs and Elon Musk can add excitement to our lives through innovation, advocacy of new technologies, and their fearless acceptance of personal risk. We defend the rights of exceptional individuals to create and sustain their businesses within the reasonable limits we advocate, which help average people to avoid becoming prey.
We need people who are willing to fight the frustrations posed by complex bureaucracies to build the modern structures of our cities, like Donald Trump says he does; or put IPhones into the hands of every citizen, like Steve Jobs once did.
But these innovators don’t build their businesses by themselves without securing a lot of help, both from government and the public. We don’t want these entrepreneurs to rule over us like feudal-lords. No way.
2016 can’t be about which Kings & Queens will rule us.
It can’t be all about the innovators. It just can’t be. It can’t be all about the owners who tell us when to work and when to punch-out and go home; who tell us when to eat and when to use the bathroom; or when we can use our cell-phones at work or what sites we can visit on the Internet.
It can’t be all about the owners, who tell us how to dress and behave; who monitor our every keystroke; who eavesdrop on every conversation. It can’t be about just our owners, who decide how small will be our paychecks and how meager our benefits; who decide how few will be our sick days and how short our vacations.
It can’t be about the very same people who force employees to sign non-compete agreements and non-disclosure promises in order to work; who demand that people relinquish their rights to intellectual property; who demand that their “subjects” surrender their rights to every idea and invention they come up with during their employment and for years after their employment ends.
We might as well be ruled by Kings and Queens, by Oligarchs and Dictators. We might as well be living in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or in Korea under Kim Jong-Un.
North Korea is a beautiful country, if you live in the right neighborhoods. So was Saddam’s Iraq. So is the United States. We can do better than those two countries, where wealthy families ruled and still rule. We can do better than Iraq and North Korea.
Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person to run for president of the USA during the past twenty-five years.
Hillary Clinton — the only viable candidate who actually grew up poor; who is not and never will be a billionaire — is fully capable of leading the way, if we let her.
Civil Rights hero and Georgia Congressman John Lewis reminded Americans that Hillary Clinton stood with the poor and disadvantaged from her first day in politics.
Our votes shouldn’t entrench the power of the truly wealthy — the billionaires — who most ordinary people understand by now don’t really care about us.
A brave and free people do not have any good reason to increase the power and privilege of billionaires; not in this election; not this time, not ever.
NOTE: (November 11, 2016)On 11-9 news outlets declared Donald Trump the winner of the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton won the popular contest by three million votes over Trump. Trump lost the popular contest by 11 million votes overall due to third-party candidates who drew away votes that might have changed the outcome.
Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders siphoned 2.5 million votes. To win, Hillary needed 55% of the white female vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; she got 53% according to exit polls.
Who knows?
What is certain: had Hillary received 100 thousand more votes in those three democratic-leaning states where voters cast 13 million ballots; had she gathered another one-half percent of the combined total in the three states, the electoral college would have tipped in her favor; she would be the president-elect.
With a multitude of third-party candidates staying in the race, Clinton couldn’t win in the electoral college. Trump, for his part, received 11 million votes less than Hillary and third-party candidates combined.
The election result is unfair and debilitating to the ideals of government we hold dear. Billy Lee believes that the result will prove to be catastrophic to the country we love; to the country many have given their lives to protect and defend. It is a sad end to democracy as we know it.
The good news is that people don’t seem to care — so no harm done; at least not yet. Does it matter to anyone at all that the USA may soon collapse; that our citizens may have voted in the last somewhat fair election?
Most informed people understand that no way exists to hold fair elections. Elections that approach fairness are possible when candidates follow the rules. Collaborating with foreign governments like Russia and Israel is not only unfair, it’s illegal.
So what difference does it make this time around? Statistical analysis points to tampering in some districts. Recounts were stopped by the GOP in every state. Is it possible that our most recent election was not fairly counted?
We may never know.
Reality Winner, NSA whistle blower.
9 Sept 2018
NSA employee Reality Winner is now serving 5 years in federal prison for providing the press with NSA documents that confirmed vote-counting fraud.
The Editors
From our lofty vantage point, it looks like nothing really matters. Life goes on, as it always does in a world that has never been truly free or democratic and may never be.
Brave women got hurt again by powerful men. It’s not new.
The Editorial Board
Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. Does anyone think it can be otherwise? Donald Trump will run against her. Does anyone imagine that this billionaire standard-bearer for the new Confederacy is going to abandon politics and flee peacefully into the night? Of course not. Hitler didn’t.
The war of the alpha-male verses the diminutive-submissive-female has waged for tens-of-thousands of years and the outcome is always the same: men start and fight wars; men write laws; men write scripture; men dominate and abuse women. The women who object; who say no; who stand their ground, men label witches; they burn them at the phallic stake.
Taylor Swift wrote — in her song, Blank Space — “Boys only want love if it’s torture.” Really. The history of male-female relationships on planet Earth is sickening. It’s disgusting.
Men demand compliant females, and they use their intellect and imagination to invent sadistic systems of social intercourse to push women and girls into the most precarious and perilous predicaments of powerlessness imaginable. (Are there too many p’s and s’s in the last sentence? Am I starting to rant?)
I’m fed up. I’m fed up with myself and my own personal history with women and girls. I’m fed up with the alpha-males who trash the planet and destroy lives — all because they like to play with gunpowder and rockets and bombs and hi-tech weapons for a thrill they get, apparently, from testosterone-gone-wild. (I am ranting; forgive me.)
We have reached the place in our history as a species when violent, well-meaning but pumped-up men are going to get us all killed — while they poison the planet to extinction — if we don’t change a few things. Time is running out; it’s time for changes, right now.
Hollywood gave us a vision of a man and a woman working as partners to survive against overwhelming odds in a hostile environment designed, it seemed, to utterly destroy them. From the 1951 classic film, African Queen.
OK. I’m going to calm down. I guess I got emotional, because I hate how they hurt Obama; and I know they are going to hurt Hillary. It’s hard to watch the bullies and the haters spew their venom day after day, because they believe — way down deep in their carnivorous second-amendment-loving souls — that if it ain’t white and male, it’s un-American.
Does Hillary Clinton have the sense to protect herself by appointing a female running-mate? Selecting a progressive like Elizabeth Warren could help diminish a temptation some men might feel to make a violent adjustment to the voice of the electorate; an electorate that may already be completely ready to approve a bi-female ticket; most likely in a landslide of epic proportions.
Six years ago, Jimmy Carter, our thirty-ninth president, got fed up and wrote a letter — to a journal most folks never heard of — about the abuse of women in the church and in the world. It was ignored at the time. A few months ago, in April 2015, the letter resurfaced, passed into cyberspace and went viral.
The Pontificator is reprinting it here for readers who didn’t see it in 2009 or don’t remember it. It has provided a link to the original opinion-piece at the end of this essay, because in this version the Editorial Board redacted a few words to protect sensitive readers; mostly children.
What we reproduce below is Jimmy Carter’s explanation of the reasons why he resigned his affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention — an organization where for years he played a prominent role. He shares his painful experience to give courage to those who dare to stand up for others who are devalued, shunned and excluded from prominent roles, because God made them female; because the alpha-males in the SBC who exercised authority interpreted Scripture to maximize male-privilege.
President Carter writes that the SBC adopted policies that devalued women and excluded them from leadership — no exceptions permitted. No one has to agree with all of the former president’s reasons — or any of them, for that matter. The Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board most certainly does not agree with everything he wrote.
I am reprinting his article, because I have always admired Mr. Carter; even before he became president. Jimmy Carter is the only president we’ve ever had who never killed anyone or ordered anyone killed. Correct me, if anyone can prove me wrong. No one can.
Jimmy Carter’s feat of non-violent pacifism is as spectacular an achievement as any human being can accomplish who directs a country as militarized and corrupt as our own.
In 2002, former President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize, because, among other accomplishments, he established in 1982 the Carter Center, which became a powerful catalyst for the world-wide advancement of human rights and the alleviation of human suffering.
Someday, probably sooner than later, Jimmy Carter will die. It’s because he’s old. He’s ninety-one. Aging presents a person with a lot of challenges, some of which are difficult to articulate; difficult to explain. Getting old changes us. Some discover a clarity of thought and moral insight they never dreamed possible in their youth.
Getting old has it’s downside, too. No one likes it. But as my dear dad used to say when he was alive, Old age sure beats the alternative.
What follows below are the words of our thirty-ninth president, Jimmy Carter:
Wife Rosalynn Carter and his mother Lillian apply Jimmy Carter’s officer insignia bars at the U.S. Naval Academy. Thirty years later he ran successfully for president of the United States (1977-1981). He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. (AP Photo)
I have been a practicing Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.
This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries.
At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, [REDACTED] and national laws that omit [REDACTED] as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.
The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.
In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job. If a woman is [REDACTED], she is often most severely punished as the guilty party in the crime.
The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.
It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population. We need to challenge these self-serving and outdated attitudes and practices — as we are seeing in Iran where women are at the forefront of the battle for democracy and freedom.
I understand, however, why many political leaders can be reluctant about stepping into this minefield. Religion, and tradition, are powerful and sensitive areas to challenge. But my fellow Elders and I, who come from many faiths and backgrounds, no longer need to worry about winning votes or avoiding controversy — and we are deeply committed to challenging injustice wherever we see it.
The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. We have decided to draw particular attention to the responsibility of religious and traditional leaders in ensuring equality and human rights and have recently published a statement that declares: “The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable.”
We are calling on all leaders to challenge and change the harmful teachings and practices, no matter how ingrained, which justify discrimination against women. We ask, in particular, that leaders of all religions have the courage to acknowledge and emphasize the positive messages of dignity and equality that all the world’s major faiths share.
The carefully selected verses found in the to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place — and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence — than eternal truths. Similar biblical excerpts could be found to support the approval of slavery and the timid acquiescence to oppressive rulers.
I am also familiar with vivid descriptions in the same Scriptures in which women are revered as pre-eminent leaders. During the years of the early Christian church women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets. It wasn’t until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.
The truth is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions — all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.
Jimmy Carter
39th president of the United States
Note to readers:In college, Jimmy Carter competed on the Naval Academy’s track-team with fellow athlete Wesley Brown — the first African-American midshipman to graduate from our country’s most elite military college. They became friends.
In 1958, Wesley Brown, by then an active-duty naval officer, and Billy Lee, then a fourth-grader, became neighbors; their families lived next door to each other in the Hoskins Park military housing complex (now Wickford Pointe, a private community) near the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Billy Lee’s childhood relationship with this extraordinary naval officer is the backdrop to his essay, Racism, which might interest some readers.
The Editorial Board
The gifted female artist promised to build the monument using only the finest Carrara marble, quarried in Italy. It would stand sixty-six feet high and be mounted atop a marble platform ten feet tall. Its several sections, when assembled, would weigh 320 tons.
The committee selected a site on La Cabana Hill in the suburb of Casa Blanca. From a vantage point 260 feet above Havana Harbor, Christ Jesus would view the entire bay, the entrance to the harbor, and the city itself across the water.
The faithful of Havana could look across the bay toward the statue — blazing white under the Havana sun — and know in their hearts that Jesus loved them and watched over them.
Marta Fernandez Batista commissioned the Statue of Christ overlooking Havana Harbor.
It took nearly three years of hard work in both Italy and Cuba, but on Christmas day 1958 Marta dedicated the statue for the people of Cuba. From now on Jesus would defend them from every danger, including the danger posed by the brutal Communists against whom her husband’s army — with America’s help — battled valiantly on the eastern side of the island.
Marta didn’t know (how could she?) that six days after the dedication ceremony, she and her husband would find themselves scrambling into a convoy of planes to fly off the island with hundreds of their closest friends — fleeing for their lives — because guerilla soldiers had somehow overrun Santa Clara, her husband’s last line of defense.
The dirty unshaven mostly black soldiers, who belonged to the devil himself — Che Guevara — were poised to swarm into the city like the fire-ants every Christian knew they were.
Marta and her husband escaped the island after a New Years Eve party made famous in the 1974 classic movie, The Godfather Part Two, which featured Al Pacino. They took expensive art and the Cuban treasury with them, but left behind a 1.2 billion dollar debt as well as a history of annual deficits in the hundreds-of millions for the new government to repay.
In the meantime, while the Batista entourage continued to orchestrate its exile, during a freak storm, lightning struck Marta’s beloved statue of Jesus. Its head disintegrated some say and crashed to the ground.
Sculptress Jilma Madera constructed the Christ in the Harbor statue. Some have claimed that she modeled the face after her own.
It was just as well that Marta didn’t see it happen. She had worked so hard to bring this gift of God’s love to the citizens of Havana. The new government — it wouldn’t become a Communist government for a few more years — cleaned up the mess and rebuilt Jesus to his former glory.
As time went on, the powerful Batista family lived out its patriarch’s remaining years in various countries until Fulgencio died of a heart attack at age 72 in Marbella, Spain in 1973.
Marta moved to America where she lived quietly among the upscale and connected of Palm Springs, Florida. She continued giving to charity, the Church, and even hospitals until she too died, in 2006, from the complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
By all reports Marta was a beautiful Catholic, a Christian, a woman who loved Jesus. But she married a man who John Kennedy once said had run the most repressive and corrupt régime that South America had ever seen.
Havana, under Batista, became a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Sicilian Americans in crime syndicates (years later people started calling these groups, the Mafia) operated profitable casinos, as well as gambling, pornography, and prostitution franchises.
In those days, despite American investment (Americans owned three-fourths of pretty much every category of the economy, including land) dissatisfaction ran deep. Universities became hotbeds of discontent, protests, and demonstrations. Trade unions, the press, teachers, agricultural workers, priests, doctors, and lawyers vented their collective outrage at “yanqui” unfairness and domination.
The entire country, 90% of it anyway, congealed in disgust for the goons who ran everything; who stole the island’s wealth in a seemingly endless orgy of greed. Disgust turned to fear when thugs began a regimen of assassination and torture to keep dissenters in check.
Fidel Castro led a movement against the Batista cartel that included almost every person on the island.
Eventually, Fidel Castro, a brilliant attorney and son of a prominent land owner, stepped up to coordinate the opposition, which had become so complex and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to track, let alone direct. He hired a savvy Argentine physician, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, to help him. As time went on they became close friends and made history together.
After the Batista family and their closest friends fled the island, Castro arrested the men who carried out the assassinations and torture of civilians. The new government executed several hundred for capital crimes. It sentenced hundreds more to long prison terms.
Fidel then broke up his own family’s estate by distributing its land to his family’s employees. This generous act set the tone and example for the program of island-wide agrarian reform which followed.
Christ in the Harbor of Havana, Cuba
The elites in the United States were not impressed. They orchestrated a program of assassinations, sabotage, bombings, quarantine, and isolation against the island that included poisoning its agricultural exports and burning and sinking the ships of its trading partners.
The USA established an embargo so effective that some international companies lobbied Congress to make humanitarian changes, which they did.
The USA embargo continues to the present day despite resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two countries this year.
View of Havana Bay from the statue of Jesus. Click pic to view.
The decades-long barbarity of the war against Cuba by the United States shocked the modern world. Many observers (outside the United States) continue to wonder how well Cuba might have done had it not endured decades of ”dirty tricks” to undermine its vision.
Some of the methods used to destabilize the island have made it into the public domain where observers have labeled them ”diabolical.” The history of USA-Cuba relations continues to alarm people around the world. Folks wonder if the United States will ever change. They wonder if the empire to the north can change.
A few of the excesses of the fifty-five year war against Cuba are enumerated in my essay, Hey, Guevara.
But to conclude our story…
As for Marta’s statue of Jesus, it continues to guard Havana Bay to this very day. Despite fifty-five years of relentless attack from what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation ever, the island of Cuba and its statue of Jesus still stand.
