Celia Cruz to be first Afro-Latina on US currency

The Hill ^ | 02-08-2023 | Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech

[ChicagoConservative27]

The Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, will make history by becoming the first Afro-Latina on U.S. currency.

Cruz’s portrait will be featured on a new quarter set to be released in 2024, the U.S. Mint announced earlier this month.

Born in Havana in 1925, the “La Vida es un Carnaval” singer was one of the most popular artists of the 20th century and received numerous accolades for her work, including five Grammy awards and a National Medal of Arts.

Cruz is one of five people being honored by the U.S Mint as part of its American Women Quarters Program, which launched in 2022 and will continue until 2025. The other four women honored are Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to serve in Congress; Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a Civil War surgeon and women’s rights activist; Pauli Murray, Civil Rights activist and lawyer; and Zitkala-Ša, a Native American rights and voting activist from the Yankton Sioux Nation.

“All of the women being honored have lived remarkable and multi-faceted lives, and have made a significant impact on our Nation in their own unique way,” said Mint Director Ventris C. Gibson in a statement.

[T.B. Yoits]

"But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)"

― Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Memorializing it in fiat currency is but to formalize the decline in rational thinking and make the pandering official.

[chajin]

I confess I never heard of Celia Crus until this article. This is not to say she shouldn’t be honored, but would she even make the top 100 artists of the 20th century?

Among white or black people, probably not; you would have never heard her music on AM contemporary stations in the 60s, or FM top 100 stations in the 70s. She was the top Cuban guaracha singer before Castro, became a top star in the salsa community, but also sung with Pavarotti. Musicians know her, people into Latin music know her, and she loved the US and hated Castro, the perfect combination.

[butlerweave]

People only look at the Number not the Face ,LOL

[Responsibility2nd]

Really? All I know about whether or not she was a communist was found in the wiki link I posted that said this....

In 2004, the Miami Herald revealed from partially declassified US State Department papers that Cruz had been linked to Cuba’s pre-Revolution communist party, the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), as early as the 1940s.[15] The article, promoted as an “exclusive”, was written by Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg from Freedom of Information Act requests. It made several revelations. Among them, the US Embassy in Havana denied Cruz a US visa in 1952 and 1955 because of suspected communist affiliations. The article also states that Cruz had joined the youth wing of the PSP at age 20 and had used a concert to arrange a secret meeting with communists in South America on behalf of its then general secretary, Blas Roca Calderío, who has also founded the party in 1925. Cruz had also signed a public letter in support of one of the Party’s front groups, the Pro-Peace Congress. The article states that Cruz’s surviving husband, Pedro Knight, was asked about this, and is quoted he knew nothing about it. “She never told me about that. She never talked about politics,” the article quotes Knight.[16]

[TonyinLA]

She’s a singer; millions have done the same and thousands have equivalent or more talent. How many mouths does a singer feed? How many battles does a singer win? Did she cure polio?

This is a racist choice. The primary qualification for the selection is this singer’s race. That is where this country now is: honor or condemn based on melatonin. That is the reason; pretending otherwise is complicity in racism.

Another virtue signaling act to satisfy the low thinkers that honoring a person because of their race is somehow an achievement. Be born better next time, I guess.

[hanamizu]

“...Edison? Does ... inventing the light bulb pale in comparison to a sing-song girl?

---

Comrade! Haven’t you been paying attention? President Biden, formerly a full professor at Penn has told us ““A Black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison.” You have the ‘word of a Biden’ on that.

[Vermont Lt]

This month the Treasury released a coin celebrating Native American Ballet Dancers.

Nothing from those idiots in DC surprises me.

[roadcat]

Thoughts? Concerns?

I vote for James Brown - "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" and "Living in America". He's an all American of color.

[UnwashedPeasant]

Below is a snippet from the 2004 Miami Herald article "An untold chapter in the life of Celia Cruz," which appears somewhere on this page: https://www.cubanet.org/htdocs/CNews/y04/jul04/26e3.htm

The year was 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and Celia Cruz, 29, was a star on the stage and airwaves with Cuba's celebrated Sonora Matancera band. And, at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, she was banned from visiting the United States as a suspected communist.

In fact, the singer known affectionately as Celia to generations of Cuban exiles was at least twice refused an artist's visa to visit America in the 1950s, according to a recently declassified U.S. document that described her as a "well-known communist singer and stage star.''

It was an era before Fidel Castro was in power, a time when McCarthyism and the Red scare bred a Hollywood blacklist. The U.S. Congress was consumed by communism, and federal agents were hunting communists, real and imagined, in government and show business.

The Herald discovered the previously unknown chapter of Cruz's life, the nearly decadelong struggle to clear her name, after receiving her once-classified FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act.

Her biographies do not mention the episode, and the people tending to her estate, including her husband of 41 years, said she never spoke of it.

''She never told me about that. She never talked about politics,'' said her widower Pedro Knight. The alleged activities predate their relationship, to a time in her teens and 20s.

''It would've been a hard thing because, especially afterward, she was identified so much as a symbol of anti-Castroism,'' said Alejandro de la Fuente, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in race relations in Cuba.

Back then, ''it was not unusual at all for artists and intellectuals to have some sort of contact with the Communist Party,'' he said. "It was a progressive, liberal force at the time. There was nothing to be ashamed of at the time. That changed in the late 1940s, after the end of World War II.''

At her death a year ago, Cruz, 77, was an anti-communist icon of the Cuban-American exile community.

She gets my seal of approval.

[NWFree]

Does she like breakfast tacos?

[dfwgator]

I vote for James Brown - "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" and "Living in America". He's an all American of color.

I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)

[cll]

“If you’re young and are not a socialist you have no heart. If you’re an adult and are not a conservative you have no brains”.

She realized about socialism real young and really hard, and those of us who knew her, know.

[EvilCapitalist]

Who’s that guy in the second picture?

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Ridiculous.

Putting a foreign low life on American coins isn't helpful. They are on a Jihad against George Washington.

Once our coins represented ideals, like Liberty, or Freedom as in the American indian and buffalo.

I suggest we take Roosevelt off the dime and replace him with Cubans.

[Verginius Rufus]

Five women that 99% of the population has never heard of.

[cll]

The title of the article just ruined the whole thing. No one who admires Celia Cruz does so because of the color of her skin. She’s just the greatest female salsa singer of all time, and one of the best salsa singers ever, period.

If the article were titled: “World’s Greatest Salsa Singer Honored with US Coin”, we would be having a different discussion.

[Responsibility2nd]

I will say this. As a Cuban living before, during and after the Revolution - she had better align herself with TPTB.

In other words, everyone then was a commie. Or they were soon to assume room temperature.

It’s like living in Nazi Germany. You either supported the Nazi’s or you stayed deep underground.

It’s like the USA today. You either support evil, immoral woke socialism or you risk being canceled and having your life ruined.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Walker was a tranny lesbo, a freak.

[ladyjane]

Meghan Markle and Harry would be better.

LOL

[Tommy Revolts]

Afro-Latina?