“Team Cuba” — Ayers, Dohrn, just “two political activists” from Obama’s neighborhood, visited Cuba in September 2008

Venceremos Brigade-Weatherman

This must have been a highly nostalgic walk down the international revolutionary “memory lane” for Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

The following, which comes from an August 1976 redacted FBI report, provides a clear background. When, in July 1969, Vietnamese representatives met with “leading Weatherpeople” (including Dohrn) in Havana, Cuba,

… the influence of Vietnamese representatives on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leadership became sharply pronounced. At the same time, the example of the Cuban revolution became the guide for the emerging American student revolutionary. With an increasing number of trips to Havana where the youthful revolutionary could learn at first hand how to create revolution, the influence of Cuba on the developing WUO was enormous.

The WUO obtained their revolutionary methodology from the Cubans and Vietnamese and, importantly, put into practice what they had learned from them. [...]

So, when Huynh Van Ba, representative of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam (PRG), instructed WUO to “look for the person who fights hardest against cops…Don’t look for the one who says the best thing. Look for the one who fights,” the campus base was forgotten and the WUO began to recruit the greasers and assorted oddments who had displayed their hatred of authority in direct combat with police.”

Regarding the trips to Cuba, the FBI’s 1976 report states:

When the WUO initiated, planned and organized the Venceremos Brigade (VB) trips they did so with the encouragement and instructions of the Cuban government. The question of foreign influence can hardly be ignored when the purposes of the VB trips primarily served the national policy of the Cubans. Likewise when the WUO planted a bomb in the nation’s Capitol and then politicized their action with an underground communique which extolled their international revolutionary identity, the question of foreign influence was sharply brought back into focus.

In the FBI report, written while Ayers and Dohrn were still “underground”, we find “William Charles Ayers, Aka Michael Joseph Rafferty, Jr., Jules Michael Taylor, Hank Anderson”:

On August 15, 1969, it was learned that AYERS was scheduling himself to depart for Canada that date for the purpose of conferring with a group of thirty individuals who had been in Cuba during the recent past and who were due to arrive by boat on August 16, 1969. (It is noted that among those individuals returning to the United States via Canada at that time were such WUO functionaries as [Ted Gold, Bernardine Dohrn, Diana Oughton, Dionne Donghi and Eleanor Raskin.]

On July 29, 1969, AYERS made a speech on the campus of the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, during which time he discussed the SDS’s role in the Venceremos Brigade and promoted this trip to Cuba. During the course of this speech, AYERS commented as follows in response to a question about the Brigade:

In November and beginning January, SDS was involved in sending 150 people, both times to Cuba to cut cane, to cut sugar, as part of Cuba’s program to create, to put out 50 million, or what is it 100 million, 10 million tons of sugar.

They are not being paid because they are not honkeys who need to get paid in order to do something, in order to serve the people, and what they’re going to do is, there will be about 75 SDS people on each trip and about 75 people from, recruited from the Black Panther Party and Young (illegible) organizations, and other black and brown organizations that will go to Cuba, are going to live and learn about the country, by going to work to create and help the Cubans create a solid economy in the face of an economic boycott by the United States …

The Venceremos Brigade is an idea which is an attempt to show the people of the world that all Americans aren’t solid in their nature of Cuba, and that all Americans aren’t solid in their support of the economic boycott of Cuba, and so we are going to go and we are going to attempt to, attempt to help the Cubans in their efforts…

The FBI reports that Bernardine Dohrn used the names Lorraine Anne Jellins, Sharon Louise Naylor, Karen Louise DeBelius, “Mona”, Bernardine Rae Ohrnstein (her given name):

^{Kathy Boudine and Bernardine Dohrn at a press conference August 19, 1969, after Dohrn’s ’s return from Cuba. From Family Circle.}

On August 19, 1969, WUO members who had returned from a trip to Cuba held a press conference in New York to discuss their trip and to promote the planned “Days of Rage” or “National Action” scheduled to take place in Chicago October 8-11, 1969. Although there is not information to indicate that [Kathy] BOUDIN traveled to Cuba with fellow WUO members, she joined with [Bernardine Dohrn, Dionne Donghi, Ted Gold, Eleanor Raskin and Howard Jefferson Melish] in the press conference.

Nicholas M. Horrock wrote October 9, 1977, in the New York Times article about the FBI report:

The report linked the growing militancy of certain members of the Students for a Democratic Society, which resulted in the so-called Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969; to North Vietnamese advice the year before to choose youngsters who would battle with the police. [...]

It said the ultimate objective of the D.G.I’s participation in setting up the Venceremos Brigades “is the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.”

Additionally, Horrock wrote:

A man who was publicly described as the most effective informer the F.B.I. ever placed among the Weathermen, Larry Grathwohl, reported to the bureau that a code system for communications had been set up by the Cubans, the report said.

“In February 1970, leading WUO member Bill Ayers told fellow underground WUO member Larry Grathwohl that if communication could not be made through these Canadian numbers, an individual should get in touch with the Cuban Embassy in Canada in order to establish contact with other members of the WUO,” the report said.

“To do this an individual should use the code name ‘Delgado’ when referring to himself and the person with whom he desired to make contact,” it said.

In another incident, the report said, four Weathermen who had been in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades were sent back to the United States through Czechoslovakia rather than through Canada with other brigade members to lessen their chances of being arrested by the United States authorities. The four wanted to get back to the United States safely after the explosion of a house in Greenwich Village killed two members of the Weather group, Dianna Oughton and Ted Gold, and the Cubans “obliged” them by making the European travel arrangements, the report said.

Additionally, according to an October 9, 2008, Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

Operating underground, Ayers’ Weathermen aligned closely with Castro’s Cuba, which aided Marxist terror groups. Some Weathermen on the run found asylum in Havana; others, like Mark Rudd, were trained by the KGB there.

See next page for “Ayers, Dohrn and Cuba — Venezuala today”

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