This is delicious timing.
In a column appearing in the Miami Herald, Armando Salguero documents Colin Kaepernick's support for Fidel Castro.
It's quite a coincidence. The column was published on Friday before news of Castro's death broke.
Unrepentant hypocrite Colin Kaepernick defends Fidel Castro
The August evening the nation first noticed Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem at an NFL game, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback held a postgame news conference, as is typical league policy. At that news conference Kaepernick wore a T-shirt emblazoned with photos from a 1960 meeting between Malcolm X and Fidel Castro.
So after his first notable protest against what last week he called the “systematic oppression” of minorities in the United States, and saying he wants “freedom for all people,” Colin Kaepernick put on a T-shirt that featured a supportive image of one of the 20th century’s most enduring oppressors.
This absurd contradiction between what Kaepernick said and does was only a distant annoyance to me because, although I was born into Cuba’s imprisonment, I don’t often write about Kaepernick or his team. This wasn’t my fight.
But this week Colin Kaepernick is on a teleconference call with me and other South Florida reporters who cover the Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins are playing Kaepernick’s team Sunday. And Kaepernick is saying if anyone is “OK with people being treated unfairly, being harassed, being terrorized, then the problem is more what they’re doing in their lives …”
And because Kaepernick apparently doesn’t understand his words apply to him before he can apply them to others, I ask the man who protests oppression why he wore the Castro shirt when the tyrant is demonstrably a star on the world’s All Oppressor team?
...So I ask Kaepernick how he can protest oppression then ignorantly don a T-shirt featuring an oppressor?
...I’m hoping Kaepernick understands one should not make broad statements about standing up for people’s rights, then slip into a Fidel Castro shirt, suggesting approval for a man who has spent his days on the planet stifling people’s rights.
And that’s exactly the moment Kaepernick shows how lost he truly is. Because in the next breath, Kaepernick, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, explains to me, the guy born in Havana, how great Castro really is.
“One thing Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here even though we’re fully capable of doing that,” Kaepernick said.
...First, Cuba does not have the highest literacy rate. Second, don’t be surprised if the same people who report Cuba’s admittedly high literacy rate are related to those who report its election results — the ones in which the Castros get 100 percent of the votes.
Third, could it be Cuba doesn’t have to invest a lot in its prison system because, you know, dungeons and firing squads (El Paredon) are not too expensive to maintain?
... I tell Kaepernick that the United States may not invest as much as he wants on education (actually, the investment is staggering) but we also don’t break up families here.
“We do break up families here,” Kaepernick responded. “That’s what mass incarceration is. That was the foundation of slavery. So our country has been based on that as well as the genocide of native Americans.”
...I ask Kaepernick if he’s equating the breaking up of Cuban exile families by a dictator with people being sentenced to prison in the United States.
“I’m equating the breaking up of families with the breaking up of families,” Kaepernick responded.
...My exchange with Kaepernick ended there, after about three minutes, because I was stunned how someone so outspoken about his beliefs could be so ignorant to facts not up for debate. I suppose he thinks he made salient points in our back and forth.
All he did was expose himself as a fraud.
So wear your Malcolm X shirt that features Fidel Castro, Colin Kaepernick. Wear it around a town where hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles live with memories similar to mine. Wear it on the field Sunday during pregame if you’re so proud of it.
Show everyone what an unrepentant hypocrite you are.
Kaepernick is on the record as defending Castro.
Thankfully, Salguero introduces some reality into the discussion.
The mourning of Castro by the Leftists, like Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, and others at MSNBC, and most likely, Kaepernick, is seriously misguided.
Cuban Americans are celebrating the brutal dictator's death, not crying because Castro is gone.
Kaepernick continues to reveal his cluelessness.
