Rockers For Stalinism & Segregation!

At 58 Chrissie Hynde doesn’t feel up to the rigors of pregnancy and parturition. But hey, it’s the thought that counts. “This is for the baby we’ll never have,” recently proclaimed Hynde’s new bandmate/inamorato, JP Jones.

His “this” refers to the couple’s new song “Fidelity.” The song and title, they’re proud to announce, bubbled into the puppy-lovers’ consciousness during a recent pilgrimage to Stalinist Cuba, where the cheeky free-spirits and human-rights champions “saw pictures of Fidel Castro everywhere!”

Imagine that!

“I found my perfect lover, but he’s only half my age, “sings Hynde about JP Jones in another recent recording. (Weren’t Liz Taylor and even Madonna less exhibitionist in these matters?)

At any rate, dutiful to a maxim more predictable than the sun setting in the west after rising in the east, champion of Cuban Stalinism (and segregation) Chrissie Hynde was a noisy opponent of South African segregation. You’ll find the identical “inconsistencies” from Charles Rangel to Maxine Waters, from Danny Glover to Jack Nicholson, from Sidney Pollack to Steven Spielberg, from Francis Ford Coppola to Norman Jewison and from Ry Cooder to Bonnie Raitt.

And speaking of Bonnie Raitt, she’s not quite up to Chrissie Hynde’s exacting standards in naming improbable offspring after Stalinist (and segregationist) Fidel Castro. But the anti-apartheid and peace activist Raitt did compose a song in honor of the mass-murderer, segregationist and war-monger who came within a hair of nuking her nation. “Say hello to my little friends!” Fidel Castro prepared to yell right before the mushroom clouds from those “Missiles of October” in October of 1962.

But don’t take it from me. Take it from his famous sidekick, “If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S., including New York City,” boasted the t-shirt icon of peaceniks and flower children in November 1962. “The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” Che Guevara thought he was speaking “off-the-record” to Sam Russell of Britain’s Daily Worker at the time. I note that Benicio Del Toro and Stephen Soderbergh left out this surefire dramatic quote from their recent drama on Che.

Bonnie Raitt titled her paen to the dictator who craved to incinerate her, her family and her countrymen, “Cuba is Way Too Cool!” and performed it in Fidel’s very fiefdom in March 1999 during a star-studded musical extravaganza titled “Music Bridges over Troubled Waters.”

With Woody Harrelson gyrating drunkenly beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse, she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots (even then), rasped out her ditty at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. A beaming, waving Jimmy Buffett came on after Bonnie. Joane Osborne, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, former Police-men Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland all made the groovy scene and took the stage in turn, delighted to croon, strum and strut as guests of a regime that jailed Cuban “roqueros” en-masse.

These Cuban “roqueros’ ” crime? Why growing long hair, wearing blue jeans and listening to “yankee-imperialist rock music.” The testimony of one such Castroite-victim might be considered particularly noteworthy: “In Cuba freedom is nonexistent,” the rock guitarist told Mexico’s Proceso magazine. “The regime demands submission. It persecutes all hippies, homosexuals, poets and free thinkers. It employs total repression against them.”

This “roquero” divulged the truth only because he’d managed to escape the nation-prison Bonnie Raitt, Chrissie Hynde, Jimmy Buffet, Andy Summers, etc. all herald. That escapees name is Canek Sanchez Guevara– Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s very grandson! The regime co-founded by his grandfather jailed and tortured Canek for the crime of trying to play Rock music!

A crowd of 5,000 Cubans huddled before Bonnie, Jimmy and friends that day in March ’99, swaying and clapping. Most were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. Let’s step back and contemplate the scene: here are these troubadours for human rights. Here’s the same smarmy gang who boycotted South Africa (“I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City!” thunders Bonnie Raitt herself alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled, “Artists United Against Apartheid.”)

But she’ll GLADLY play in Havana’s Karl Marx Theater and bask in the applause of an audience pledging proud fealty to the most murderous ideology in human history. Indeed she’ll happily compose a song in their honor–and all on the house!

Here’s Bonnie, Carole, Jimmy and other shrill foes of capital punishment happily crooning love songs to card-carrying members (literally!) of an ideology who’s minions shot, starved, strangled, drowned, hacked and worked to death 100 million human beings in the 20th century. According to researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie and Jimmy’s very audience had a hand in almost 100,000 of these murders. Here are these do-gooders playing (free-of-charge) because of an invitation from Stalinists!

These musical hipsters composed gushy odes to coolness and happiness of a nation with the highest (youth) emigration, incarceration and suicide rates on the face of the globe.

When Cuba’s suicide rate reached 24 per thousand in 1986–making it double Latin America’s average, making it triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48–at that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications horrified even the Castroites.

In Fidel Castro’s fiefdom Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly authored paeans to the coolness and happiness of a place that also criminalized Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ records, and where long hair, blue jeans, and/or effeminate behavior got tens of thousands of youths yanked off the streets by secret police and herded into prison camps at Soviet bayonet-point.

“Way Too Cool!” indeed, Ms Raitt.