Who Jesse and Al Don't Talk About
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Myles B. Kantor
Saturday, Oct. 19, 2002
So now Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are upset about "Barbershop."
Set in a black barbershop in Chicago, this MGM production features a barber who opines irreverently about well-known blacks. For instance, he refers to Martin Luther King Jr. as a "ho."
In "I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.," King supporter Michael Eric Dyson refers to the reverend's "Promethean trysts," "rampant womanizing" and "relentless infidelity." This behavior preceded King's marriage:
Even after he met his future bride, Coretta Scott, he satisfied his ample sexual appetite. King confessed to Coretta that he had cheated on her with an Atlanta girl over the 1952 Christmas break. They quarreled and then reconciled, and then announced their June 1953 wedding. But even after their marriage, King continued to stray.
Dyson later writes:
Besides his many casual carnal connections, King had established relationships of significant affection with three women. One of the women, in fact, had become King's de facto wife, a spousal equivalent upon whom he became emotionally dependent as she replaced Coretta as the primary focus of her husband's intimacy and affection.
The barber's claim seems factually based.
Jackson and Sharpton have appeared on programs like "Crossfire" and "Donahue" calling for the removal of content they don't like in "Barbershop." Sharpton has talked about a possible boycott.
Admirably, MGM hasn't capitulated to these buffoons' demands. "MGM stands behind "Barbershop," its filmmakers and artists, and we have no intention of altering the film in any way," it said.
While Jackson and Sharpton target a work of art by black people, they continue to ignore a black population's captivity 90 miles from America.
People of color are a majority in Cuba, and there's no Afro-Cuban exemption from Fidel Castro's totalitarianism. Blacks can't establish a Cuban NAACP, their own newspapers or Web sites, or criticize the white autocrat who suffocates their identity. If they want to leave Master Castro's plantation, they need a pass.
Black Cuban Eusebio Peņalver was an officer in the rebel army against Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship. He soon opposed Castro's new tyranny, participating in the peasant-based Escambray resistance.
Captured in 1960, Peņalver remained in prison until October 1988. In addition to physical torture, Castro's thugs would tell him, "Nigger, we brought you down from the trees and cut your tail!" Peņalver remarks, "That is, they were saying that Negroes were monkeys, that we were on trees and the revolution brought us down and made us persons and therefore we were their slaves."
In "Twenty Years and Forty Days," former prisoner of conscience Jorge Valls similarly recounts how guards would say to his black peers, "You nigger, how could you revolt against a revolution that is finally making human beings out of you?" Valls adds, "They always got more than their share of the beatings and bayonets."
Peņalver notes Castro's place in the constellation of tyrants: "There is no difference between the Cuban dictator and Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, or any of the dictators who have terrorized the peoples of the world."
Jackson and Sharpton protested Nelson Mandela's imprisonment, but I don't recall their solidarity for Eusebio Peņalver then or now.
In recent years, many blacks have been persecuted for dissenting from Castro's dogma. Just one example is prisoner of conscience Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, ripped from his family since November 1999.
I don't see Jackson or Sharpton demanding the liberation of Dr. Biscet and his countrymen. In fact, both have been Castro's guests. Sharpton even describes Castro as "brilliant" and "absolutely awesome" in his new book, "Al on America."
Continue your crusade against "Barbershop," Jesse and Al. It's not like millions of black Cubans' rights are being crushed right now.
Contact Myles Kantor at kantor@FreeEmigration.com
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