Revelatioź©²ns about Bill de Blasioās jaunts to communist Cuba and Nicaragua arenāt sitting well with those who battled ā and fled ā those countriesā repressive regimes.
āI think he ought to be quiet about that,ā said retš°ired US Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, who aided anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua as part of the 1980s Iran-Contra affair.
āPeople who supāported the Sandinistas were doing so in violation of the announcšøed policy of the United States.ā
TšŖhe Democratic public advocate and mayoral front-runner was an āadmirerā of the communist Sandinistas and traveled to Nicaragua at the age of 26 to distribute food and medicine in 1988, The New York Times reported Monday.
A member of the National Association of Cuban-American Women also blastāØed de Blasioās honeymoon in Cuba.
āFidel Castro killed a lot of people in my counš try in the ā60s and ā70s. When you are against him, he will do something agšainst you,ā she said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she still has relatives living in the nation.
Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota said de Blasioās globe-hopping to countries battling the US showed āitās pretty obvious we think very, very differentš§ly about the way the governments of the world should work.ā
āI believe actionšs takāen like the Sandinistas, who were fighting Americans as well as capitalism, was absolutely not the right thing to do during the Cold War,ā he said.
The former MTA chief also noted that de Blasio āin his own š„words, he called himself a democratic socialist.ā
Independence Party šcandidate Adolfo CarriĆ³n went even further, labeling de Blasio a āradical without a clue.ā
De Blasio called his opponentsā criticisms āa right-wing tactic,ā saying, āThe reason I got involved in this work from the beginning was I saw inequalities, I saw uš nfairness.ā