Is LA Mayor Karen Bass Still a Communist

It’s worth asking whether LA’s Mayor Karen Bass is still a communist as we try to understand her odd, defensive behavior regarding the ongoing wildfires in her city, also her ill-timed trip to Ghana when the possibility of these fires was already predicted.

I recalled she was an admirer of Fidel Castro, but had forgotten how recent her fulsome praise was, less than a decade ago. From left-leaning Politico August 2020 :

“Rep. Karen Bass on Sunday walked back 2016 comments praising Cuban leader Fidel Castro, as scrutiny of her views toward the Communist government threatened her potential selection as former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate.

“On ‘Fox News Sunday,’ the California Democrat faced questions about several visits to Cuba in the 1970s and a statement she released after Castro’s 2016 death saying, ‘the passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba.’

“Bass told Fox host Chris Wallace that her perspective ‘developed over time’ and that she now understood that the Castro government ‘was a brutal regime.’ Bass said she spoke with colleagues from Florida who raised concerns about her comments and that she ‘would not do that again, for sure.’”

Okay, we’re grownups here and I will admit that I at first thought Fidel was pretty cool too. I even went to hear him speak in Central Park. But I was still in high school then and it was 1960.

It wasn’t long, only a few years, that I realized he was a brutal dictator who, along with his buddy El Che, took his old comrades who varied in even minor ways from his party line and lined them up against a wall and shot them. I further learned he imprisoned homosexuals or sent them to re-education camps. This only ended around 2010 after Fidel had had years of criticism.

I saw his Cuba for myself in 1979 when I was a delegate to the First Festival of the New American Cinema or some such (can’t remember the exact name) and saw an island beautiful in nature but absolutely totalitarian in the way its regime treated its impoverished people. Havana itself was completely run down, its paranoid citizens spying on each other. My small group was delayed at the airport getting out and I well recall being scared that I would be trapped there, a feeling I later had in the Soviet Union.

This was obviously considerably before then Rep. Bass was still singing the praises of Fidel, her Comandante en Jefe who died a billionaire while his people languished in misery.

I knew people like her when I was living in Los Angeles during the 70s and 80s. Some of them, like now Mayor Bass, went to Cuba again and again, signifying their allegiance while ignoring or downplaying the “excesses.” They did the same with Mao. You have to break a few eggs and all that.. None of them that I recall called themselves communists explicitly but they really were at heart. Maybe they thought of it as a way to stay cool and young, but for many it was more than that. They were serious about it.

Some, I’m not going to name names to protect myself actually, rose to prominent positions in LA city politics, also in education. It was a good way to do it. Everybody winked. They were the people around something then called the Echo Park Food Conspiracy who would come up and clap me on the back, saying, “Roger, the struggle continues!”

Others, the wealthy Hollywood ones, were almost comically hypocritical. I knew the wife of a famous director, again I’m not naming names, a very nice bourgeois lady and not particularly a sexpot, who went to Cuba, was introduced to Castro at some reception and immediately swooned, kissing him full on the lips in adoration. This was told to me by the director himself who found it amusing.

I didn’t and I don’t. I look at myself in those days as a bit of a phony. I didn’t really believe any of the lefty stuff, not in a real way, but I was more a fly on the wall looking for material for my writing. Some of it appeared in the early Moses Wine mysteries.

But when I watch Karen Bass on television from Nashville—I don’t know her personally—I definitely recognize her as a character out of those days. It’s easy to imagine her having virtually no interest in the day-to-day activities of a mayor like making sure there’s enough water in the pumps or that brush is cleared, but only in “continuing the struggle by whatever means necessary.”

So that is what I see when watching the city where I lived for all but the last few years of my adult life go up in smoke. The struggle continues indeed.

https://keywiki.org/Karen_Bass

Progressive Mayors
From [Communist Party USA leader] John Bachtell, May 9, 2023:

Johnson is not alone among newly elected progressive mayors. Broad-based, diverse multi-racial people’s coalitions have helped elect a wave of new progressive mayors and elected officials in the last few years, including Johnson, Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Michelle Wu in Boston, Tishaura Jones in St. Louis, Ras Baraka in Newark, and Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, Miss. Helen Gym could join this group if she is elected mayor of Philadelphia on May 16.[2]
‘Holman Group’

From Kent Wong:

I first worked closely with Rev. Lawson in the 1980s when I was staff attorney for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). A network of young activists approached Rev. Lawson to learn from his vast experience helping shape the Civil Rights Movement and to see if we could apply those lessons to labor organizing in Los Angeles. He agreed to meet with us and challenged us to apply nonviolence as a living and breathing science — and as a way of life. He explained that during the course of our lives, the majority of social justice campaigns we will work on will not succeed the first time or perhaps for years, and yet we must persevere. We went on to meet for years on a monthly basis at the Holman United Methodist Church.
We called ourselves the “Holman Group,” and our small network included California State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, who was then a union organizer for the hotel workers, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of the “Free South Africa” committee, former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who was then an organizer for United Teachers Los Angeles and former Councilmember Gilbert Cedillo who was then a representative for SEIU. We would never have imagined the collective impact Holman Group members would have on social and political change in Los Angeles in the years to come.[3] . . .

Cuba, communists, Venceremos Brigade

In a May 5 2005 exchange on Yahoo group Atzlannet, Los Angeles Communist Party USA organizer Rosalio Munoz revealed his own early connection to Karen Bass, and the of another communist Leroy Parra. He revealed that communists had indeed been [part of Bass’s movement, and that she had been a member of the Venceremos Brigade, whose members traveled to Cuba to do agricultural work in support of the Cuban revolution.[10]

History with Cuba
After Karen Bass graduated high school, a classmate who had traveled to Cuba with the first Venceremos Brigade connected her with the program, and she decided to go. She was 19 the first time she landed in Havana, in 1973. She remembers spending her time in Cuba building houses—work she compared to that of Habitat for Humanity.

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“We built houses during the day,” Bass said, “and then we had what they called cultural activities and we called parties. There was great music, rum, dancing. And we toured the country.” Going to Cuba was a way to meet other young activists, Bass told me. “Obviously, there were Cubans there doing construction work,” she said. “But it was an opportunity for all of the various activists to get together.” She wasn’t the only future politician to join the Venceremos Brigade: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a longtime friend of hers, also went.

Bass went to see Castro speak in Revolution Square in Havana, joining “about a bazillion people” in the crowd, she said. Although she couldn’t understand him, he was “extremely charismatic.” She said she was aware then that Cuba under Castro wasn’t the utopia that some of her friends believed it to be. “I know that the crowds cheered, but I have no idea what they were cheering about—and I’m not sure if they didn’t cheer, that wouldn’t have been a problem,” she said. That was the contrast she saw between American activists and Cubans at the time. “I didn’t have any illusions that the people in Cuba had the same freedoms I did. I came home and was protesting everything; I knew that the Cuban people didn’t have the ability to do that.” She didn’t buy the Cuban government’s propaganda, she insisted. I asked whether she knew any American activists who had gotten involved in espionage or violence, and she was firm in her response: “Let me say: Hell no. No, I did not know anybody like that.”

Jeff Schatz, who met Bass on that first trip to Cuba and remains a friend, told me that he remembered her mediating between American volunteers who were getting on each other’s nerves. “She just got in there and worked to say ‘Hey, we’re out here to learn stuff. We’re out here to work and work together,” said Schatz, who added that he fell in love with the construction work he did in Cuba and decided to make a career of it. He now runs a business that specializes in building luxury homes in Malibu.

Two years after Bass’s first trip, the head of the Dade County, Florida, bomb squad testified to the Senate Internal Security Committee that interrogations of members of violent organizations in America had led his group to the Venceremos Brigade. In 1977, the FBI produced a report alleging that some members of the Venceremos Brigade received weapons training. Bass told me she has always rejected violence, and didn’t associate with any militant groups.

Bass returned to Cuba without the Brigade in the years that followed, and saw Castro speak several times. She never met him, she said. She was there eight times in the 1970s, and has been back about as many times since. That’s good evidence that she didn’t lead her life focused on building a résumé or trying to rise in politics, she argued. She never hid her association with the Brigade—she gave a “Contemporary Cuban Society” lecture on Valentine’s Day 1977 at UC Santa Barbara (tickets were $1 at the door), for which she was identified as part of the group.

The American government’s interest in the Venceremos Brigade continued for years. In 1982, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing featuring a former member of Cuban intelligence who had defected to the United States. He testified that Cuban intelligence had connected with members of the Brigade while they were in the country, and that some Americans had become sources for the Cubans. Bass says she wasn’t involved in anything like that, either.

But Bass was well enough known as a community activist, with a focus on protesting police brutality, that the local government tried to come after her because of her connections to the organization. In 1983, L.A. police chief Daryl Gates tried to link Bass to a gun-running operation, using police reports that said Bass had “returned from Cuba bringing back propaganda literature.” She told police that she had not received any military training while in Cuba, and told me that the police had fixated on her learning to use a gun for target practice during a Brigade camping trip outside L.A. “I’m angry and I’m shocked that they would use [this allegation] to try to attempt to smear me personally and the brigade,” she told the Associated Press at the time. Bass later learned that the person who taught her to use a gun during that camping trip was an undercover police officer. Looking back, she called her questioning by police “absolutely absurd,” telling me, “I never, ever, ever came near a gun in Cuba, period. Never. And frankly, I think if any of that had been true, they would have brought us all in jail.”

Bass’s interest in Cuba kept up after she became a member of the California assembly. She went to the country again in 2005, on a trip organized by the California lobbyist Darius Anderson and paid for out of her campaign account, according to campaign-finance records kept by the California secretary of state. She’s returned several times since being elected to the U.S. House in 2010. She visited Alan Gross, the USAID contractor whom Cuba accused of being a spy, during his five years in prison, and joined then–Secretary of State John Kerry when he went to Havana to raise the American flag over the reestablished U.S. embassy in 2015. President Barack Obama invited Bass—by then a key supporter of normalizing relations with Cuba—to join the presidential delegation during his historic trip in 2016. From there, she tweeted a sepia-toned photo of herself from her Venceremos Brigade trip, in sunglasses with a bandanna on her head.

Cuba has been the main issue that people who don’t want Biden to pick Bass have focused on, mostly because of a statement she made after Castro died in 2016, when she referred to him as “comandante en jefe,” which she says was a poor attempt to translate commander in chief. In Cuba, this was a phrase Castro’s government often used to praise him. When I spoke with her in early July about that statement, she told me that she somehow hadn’t fully realized how Cuba and Castro were seen in Florida, as opposed to California. She told me last week that she’s since reached out to congressional colleagues from Florida, and to Cuban American leaders, to further her understanding of the issue.[12]. . .

Our Revolution endorsement 2020

Peace Action
Peace Action endorsed Karen Bass in the 2018 election cycle.[13]

Line of March connections
Karen Bass was heavily involved with the Maoist Line of March. . .

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