9 Progressive Gatherings Gone Terribly, Terribly Wrong

This Saturday, professional progressives — mostly union types, self-described communists, “faith groups” and other full-time “activists” — bussed their minions into Washington, DC, hoping to outdo Glenn Beck’s spectacular Restore America event at the same location.

After the fact, AP reported that crowds at the hastily organized “One Nation” rally “were less dense” than those at Beck’s — a bit of unintentional (I hope) humor, perhaps?

While the Beck rally stretched well down the National Mall, Saturday’s event was shaping up to be far smaller, with sparse groups lingering around the reflecting pool and other monuments.

Some people described the event as a counter-protest to the Beck rally. Many mentioned the perceived racism they see among the tea party-style activists, even though no one who spoke at the Beck rally neared anything approaching criticism of President Barack Obama or his race. (…)

Organizers insisted the rally wasn’t partisan and said the message was about job creation, quality education and justice. However, the largest of the organizers, such as the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union, tend to back Democratic candidates.

So far, I haven’t found any reports of arrests or fatalities at today’s rally.

Which is great news because sometimes when folks like this get together, the outcome isn’t good.

And I just don’t mean the documented fact that Obama’s fans left a mess in the Mall after his inauguration, while Beck’s friends brought their own garbage bags to 8/28 and dutifully cleaned up their own trash, such as it was.

In February of this year, the highly respected Chronicles of Higher Education ran a piece called “The Night They Burned Ranum’s Papers.” It solved a mystery of sorts that dated back to 1968, when the Students for a Democratic Society chapter at Columbia went on “strike” then occupied various university buildings, including the Dean’s office, to protest the Vietnam War and alleged institutional racism.

Vandalism was rampant, but the mystery surrounding one particularly heartbreaking example went unsolved until that Chronicles essay appeared:

At about 2:30 a.m. on May 22, 1968, as New York City police entered Hamilton Hall, on Columbia University‘s Morningside Heights campus, to clear it of demonstrators, files belonging to Orest A. Ranum, an associate professor of history, were ransacked, and papers documenting more than 10 years of research were burned. (…)

Now a key participant in the Columbia rebellion has made a startling confession. Mark Rudd, who was chairman of the [Students for a Democratic Society] SDS chapter during the disturbances, acknowledges that a fellow radical, John “J.J.” Jacobs, set the fire in Hamilton Hall, and that he, Rudd, went along with the plan. The confession, a depressing postscript to the 1960s, solves a four-decade-long mystery.

It offers a grim testament to just how mean things got at Columbia, and a sobering reminder that not all student radicals were starry-eyed idealists. In more than a couple of cases, they were power-hungry extremists jostling for control of the student-protest movement. And Ranum had the audacity to get in their way. (…)

The papers were irreplaceable. They dated back to Ranum’s time as a student at the University of Minnesota, where he got his Ph.D. in history. The notes were going to lay the basis for a textbook on early modern European history that he had been commissioned to write…

And if Mark Rudd’s name sounds vaguely familiar, then that can only mean you’re a regular NewsReal Blog reader: Rudd was a founding member of the Weather Underground.

Apparently we’re supposed to call it the “Haymarket Affair” now, like it’s some old Deborah Kerr movie or something.

(I dunno: an incident where seven police are killed after a bomb goes off in a crowd of two thousand angry, armed protesters sounds more like a “riot.”)

Or the “Haymarket Tragedy” — note that this site, which is the third result when you type “Haymarket Riot” into Google, displays a photo of the men convicted of the bombing, not the murdered cops. Charming.

On May Day 1886, the workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. in Chicago began a strike in the hope of gaining a shorter work day. On May 3, police were used to protect strikebreakers and a scuffle broke out; one person was killed and several others injured.

The following day, May 4, a large rally was planned by anarchist leaders to protest alleged police brutality. A crowd of 20,000 demonstrators was anticipated at Haymarket Square, where area farmers traditionally sold their produce. Rain and unseasonable cold kept the numbers down to between 1,500 to 2,000. The gathering was peaceful until a police official, in contravention of the mayor’s instructions, sent units into the crowd to force it to disperse. At that juncture, a pipe bomb was thrown into the police ranks; the explosion took the lives of seven policemen and injured more than 60 others. The police fired into the crowd of workers, killing four.

A period of panic and overreaction followed in Chicago. Hundreds of works were detained; some were beaten during interrogation and a number of forced confessions was obtained. In the end, eight anarchists were put on trial and seven were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Four were hanged in November 1887, one committed suicide and three were later pardoned by Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld.

Sounds like a sordid mess all around. But note that the flyer (above) announcing what later became the Haymarket Riot read in part:

What struck me was that fact that, early on (while it was still relatively peaceful) the Mayor of Chicago spoke at this rally.

There are three monuments in Chicago commemorating the Riot: one celebrates the brave, noble workers in typical Art Brut style; one celebrates the “martyrs” convicted of setting the bomb, and one remembers the police officers who lost their lives. That last statue was removed from public display after being repeatedly vandalized. And you’ll never guess by who!

Late on the night of October 6 [1969], members of the Weathermen blew up America’s only monument to policemen, a statue that was located in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.

Dig it! Anarchists blowing up a statue of “pigs” who got blown up by anarchists!! Deep, man!

And as David Horowitz wrote in his definitive essay about domestic-terrorist-turned-Obama-fundraiser Bill Ayers, the Haymarket rioters remained influential with 1960s and 70s radicals, right up to the day the New York Times ran that loving profile of former Weatherman Ayers: September 11, 2001…

Instead of a critique of this malignant couple and their destructive resume, the Times’ portrait provides a soft-focus promotion for Ayers’ newly published Fugitive Days, a memoir notable for its dishonesty and its celebration of his malevolent exploits. Ayers’ text wallows in familiar Marxist incitements and the homicidal delusions of Sixties radicalism, including a loving reprint of an editorial from the old socialist magazine Alarm! Written by Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket anarchists, whom the Weathermen idolized:

“Dynamite! Of all the good stuff, that is the stuff! Stuff several pounds of this sublime stuff into an inch pipe…plug up both ends, insert a cap with a fuse attached, place this in the immediate vicinity of a lot of rich loafers who live by the sweat of other people’s brows, and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result will follow. In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work.”

In Fugitive Days, Ayers has written – and the Times promoted – a text that the bombers of the World Trade Center could have packed in their flight bags alongside the Koran, as they embarked on their sinister mission.

Yet the naive continue to puzzle about, or deny as absurd, the romance between the Western Left and Muslim terrorism.

The Who thought so highly of their contract to play Woodstock that they gave away copies of it with their "Live at Leeds" album -- like the prize in a cereal box

What can I say? I’m a Pistol’s era punk, and we looked down on everything about longhairs: their 20-minute guitar solos, their laid back attitude, their trust funds and especially, their “free love” ethos that greased the skids for our own parents’ divorces.

So the word “Woodstock” makes me sneer: a weekend of filth and mud, middle class kids playing primitives, ill advised public nudity, all thrown together by ruthless entrepreneurs of the sort the concert goers claimed to despise.

Like a lot of ex-punks, my only treasured moment from that 1969 concert is Pete Townsend smashing Abbie Hoffman over the head with his guitar. And I always kinda liked Abbie Hoffman. But that day, he went back on his word, as you’re about to see.

One of the best alternative takes on those “3 days of peace” known as Woodstock was written by Laurence Jarvik, and appeared in a 1994 issue of Heterodoxy. You can download and read the whole thing — and I hope you will.

In the popular myth, the concert was supposed to display the love, cooperation, and communal good feeling at the heart of Sixties utopianism. A close look at what happened at Woodstock shows quite the opposite. The murders [sic] at Altamont were already foreshadowed at Woodstock by thefts, assaults, [approximately 5000 injuries, according the the NYT], drug sales, and at least two reported meaningless deaths. (…)

Yippie leader Paul Krassner wrote about a famous violent incident at Woodstock in his aptly titled autobiography, Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut. He recalled: “While The Who was performing, Abbie Hoffman went up on stage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair of the White Panthers was serving ten years in prison for possession of two joints, that this was really the politics behind the event, but before he could get his message out, Pete Townshend turned his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed Abbie in the head with a swift backhand. And my yellow leather fringe jacket that I was wearing for the first time was stolen from the “Movement City’ tent.” (…)

“Neither rain, nor garbage, nor Students for a Democratic Society could provoke the kids. SDS and other radical groups, however, were paid well not to start trouble. Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman got $10,000 [just under $60,000 in today's dollars] from Woodstock to set up a big tent as headquarters for assorted radicals.”

That while The Who and other performers who’d flown thousands of miles to perform at Woodstock had to beg, sometimes unsuccessfully, to get paid. Fittingly for an event at which thousands of crimes were committed in the space of 72 hours, many bands were handed checks that later bounced.

If you’re a bitter Gen-Xer like me, that’s the perfect metaphor for the 1960s.

I own four of these "Altamont" t-shirts by HollywoodLoser.com, which parody the Woodstock "peace dove" logo

This concert was held just four months after the “summer of love” triumph at Yasgur’s Farm, and “Atlamont” quickly became a hushed byword, synonymous with “the death of the 60s.” Because unlike the two accidental deaths at Woodstock, one of the ones at Altamont was captured on film — and it was murder:

Taking place at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California, The Rolling Stones organized what they envisioned as sort of a Woodstock West to close out the band’s highly successful 1969 tour of the States.

The Grateful Dead, Santana and Crosby Stills & Nash were among the acts scheduled to play. It all seemed like a good intentions on paper, and a great way to close out the 60s, but then someone had the brilliant idea to bring in the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security,

The Stones hit the stage as night fell, but the set was plagued by fits and starts as Mick Jagger tried to calm the crowd down lest the pool cue wielding Hell’s Angel’s continue mercilessly beating on anyone who looked remotely offensive to them. Then, during “Under My Thumb,” another disturbance broke out in front of the stage. Eighteen year-old [African American concert goer] Meredith Hunter pulled out a gun and was immediately descended upon by a Hell’s Angel who stabbed him five times, killing him.

Perhaps the shock of progressive Paul Wellstone’s unexpected, tragic death — along with his wife and one child, the two-term Democratic Senator of Minnesota perished in a plane crash in 2002, at age 58 — was what pushed his fellow Democrats over the edge.

That, combined with some kind of mass hysteria, seemed to infect Democratic leaders who eulogized Wellstone at a now-infamous 20,000 strong memorial service at Williams Arena:

It was four years ago when Democrats turned Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone’s funeral into a full-fledged campaign rally. The anger and political message emanating from Wellstone’s funeral backfired on the party — not only in Minnesota, where Democrat Walter Mondale lost to Republican Norm Coleman for U.S. Senate, but also across America.

Coming less than a week before the 2002 midterm elections, the tenor of the Wellstone funeral did more to inspire Republicans than anything else leading up to Election Day. The GOP ended up gaining eight seats in the House and picked up two seats in Senate, which Democrats had controlled at the time.

What “tenor” was that? Well, the event was so tacky a pro-wrestler walked out in disgust:

It started with emotional remembrances of Wellstone, a politician loved by liberals and respected by conservatives. But then Rick Kahn, a friend of Wellstone, turned the event into a partisan pep rally. Democratic celebrities, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, and Al Gore, were cheered wildly. When Senate GOP Leader Trent Lott and former Republican senator Rod Grams of Minnesota were shown on the TV screen at the service, there were boos. When Mondale was shown on the screen–he didn’t give a speech–he was cheered amid chants of “Fritz, Fritz, Fritz.”

Both Gov. Jesse Ventura, an Independent, and Republicans were furious over the transformation of the memorial service into a highly partisan event. Ventura and his wife walked out, shaking their heads, during Kahn’s speech. “What a complete, total, absolute sham,” Vin Weber, a former House member from Minnesota and now an adviser to Coleman, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Democratic party “clearly intends to exploit Wellstone’s memory totally, completely, and shamelessly for political gain. To them, Wellstone’s death, apparently, was just another campaign event.”

I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure this was the time conservative bloggers started using the expression, “Stay classy, Dems!”

You’d think (ok, somebody might) that progressive elites would have learned the lessons of the Paul Wellstone funeral: don’t turn a memorial service into a partisan rally.

The rest of us weren’t even a tiny bit shocked to learn that Democrats turned the funeral of — I kid you not — Martin Luther King’s long suffering widow — into a Bush bashing extravaganza:

President Bush, as ever, maintained his dignity and demeanor. He honored Coretta Scott King at the opening of his State of the Union Address and spoke eloquently of her contributions to the nation at her memorial service at Atlanta’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church yesterday.

Rev. Joseph Lowery [who later gave a controversial benediction at President Obama's 2009 inauguration], a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), used the occasion of his longtime friend’s death to lash out at President Bush, who was seated immediately behind him (…)

After the good reverend finished equating U.S. troops with terrorists – a section that drew a two-minute-long standing ovation at a funeral – Jimmy Carter tried his hand at it. Crying crocodile tears, Carter said everyday life became “difficult for them then personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretaps.” That, too, drew applause. (Later, the same crowd heartily cheered Ted Kennedy, whose brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, approved the secret government wiretapping that made the Kings’ lives so “difficult.”)

On November 3, 1979, in Greensboro North Carolina, members of the Ku Klux Klan, joined by several members of the American Nazi party in what the media later called the United Racist Front, gunned down a group of unarmed anti-Klan demonstrators in what the survivors have memorialized as the “Greensboro Massacre.” Five demonstrators – four of whom were white and one black — died in the incident, while nine others were injured.

Writing for FrontPage in 2004, Barbara Kay detailed an event that never rose to the level of leftist legend, even though on the surface, it has all the right ingredients. So why isn’t there an award-winning play or HBO movie entitled Greensboro, starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, and directed by Oliver Stone?

The incident began and ended in eighty-eight seconds at the start of a widely publicized and press-attended march, which as captured on videotape. It’s designation as a massacre – as in “massacre of innocents” — has an air of plausibility to one unfamiliar with the facts. In reality, the demonstration was also a provocation by self-styled “revolutionaries” who had intruded themselves into a region and situation, which they clearly misjudged, and who had declared a war for which they were unprepared.

You see, the Greensboro story seems to be about race, but it’s also about class: something I’ve always been sensitive to (as a working class girl from a Commonwealth steel town) but class is a subject most Americans don’t like to discuss, or even think there’s anything to talk about.

Kay’s entire essay is one of those instant classics that would have been widely anthologized by now if she’d been writing from the left. Her concluding paragraphs have always stuck with me, one sentence in particular. The insights that seem utterly obvious to me, and to Kay, were, alas, lost on the self-appointed, well educated, white radical heroes who’d voluntarily given up well-paid elite jobs to “work with” “poor” blue collar folks.

But while the Communists were living their dream in coming to Greensboro, those they’d deigned to “help” could only fantasize about getting out of there. Why would such lucky young people throw away opportunities neither they themselves, nor their children, dared to dream of?

It was, as Kay writes, a recipe for resentment, misunderstanding and ultimately, murder:

The Communists (…) were continually frustrated in their organizing efforts because the workers of Greensboro remained stubbornly anti-union. It was out of the need to find a new strategy to advance the revolution that the decision emerged to raise their public profile by confronting the Klan. They picked the Klan as a symbolic target. Unfortunately for them, the symbol had a reality that was dangerous and armed. (…)

The murderous Klansmen and supporting members of the American Nazi party were not more virtuous than the Communists who confronted them, and indeed not virtuous at all. But in Greensboro the Communists provided a symbol that persuaded them that a real war had been declared and that in this war they were the patriots fighting an anti-American threat that was global in scope. The Cold War had come to Greensboro, and Greensboro responded. Thus did two political melodramas converge in one terrible event.

The Bolsheviks of the Communist Workers Party never appreciated that ordinary people, including many blacks, might prefer overt racists who were patriots to traitors who were not.

For the “20th Anniversary of the Summer of Love,” P.J. O’Rourke penned one of my favorites of all his “bits.” It included a chart ruefully contrasting “People Who Died During the 1960s” (John F. Kennedy) with”People Who Were Allowed to Live” (Teddy Kennedy).

The black-humored final entry under “People Who Died…” was “4 students at Kent State”. Their “Allowed to Live” counterparts?

Immortalized in an instant song by Neil Young, and by a (retouched) LIFE magazine photograph, the students shot during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State live on as another set of progressive martyrs. Which is annoying on a few levels.

Reno’s military attack on a religious sect in Waco, Texas, led to the greatest number of civilians ever killed by the government in the history of the United States. More Americans were killed in Waco than were killed at any of the various markers on the left’s via dolorosa – more than Kent State (4 killed), more than the Haymarket Square rebellion (4 killed), more than Three Mile Island (0 killed).

Progressives have a bad but telling habit of memorializing events with the fewest number of victims (or, as Coulter pointed out, none at all); the thought of long ago Kent State still brings a tear to a leftist’s eyes faster than footage of 9/11.

Second, as you might have guessed, the received legend of Kent State doesn’t quite square with the facts. Every May at my blog, I try to (cough) “raise awareness ” by citing Steve Farrell’s invaluable counter-history of the tragedy. In the days leading up to the 1970 shooting, all wasn’t peace and love at the University or in the surrounding area.

“On the evening of May 1, 1970, a day after Richard Nixon announced an American counter-attack into Cambodia, students rioted in the main street of town, broke windows, set fires, and damaged cars. On May 2, a crowd of about 800 assembled on campus, disrupted a dance in a university hall, smashed the windows of the ROTC building, and threw lighted railroad flares inside. The building burned to the ground. A professor who watched the arson later told the Scranton commission, which investigated the shooting and the events leading up to it, ‘I have never in my 17 years of teaching seen a group of students as threatening, or as arrogant, or a bent on destruction.’

“When fireman arrived students threw rocks at them, slashed their hoses with machetes, took away hoses and turned them on the firefighters. The police finally stopped the riot with tear gas. The National Guard was called in by the governor on May 2 and student rioters pelted them with rocks, doused trees with gasoline, and set them afire. Students attempted to march into town on May 3 but were stopped by the National Guard, the Kent city police department, the Ohio highway patrol, and the county sheriff’s department. The protesters shouted obscenities and threw rocks.

“From May 1 to May 4 there were, in addition, riots in the town’s main street, looting, the intimidation of passing motorists, stoning of police, directions to local merchants to put antiwar posters in their windows or have their stores thrashed, and miscellaneous acts of arson. All of this occurred before the shooting.

This year, a new (mostly ignored) revelation shed even more light on the event. As NewsReal’s Ben-Peter Terpstra reported on the 40th anniversary of Kent State:

Previously undisclosed FBI documents suggest that the Kent State antiwar protests were more meticulously planned than originally thought and that one or more gunshots may have been fired at embattled Ohio National Guardsmen before their killings of four students and woundings of at least nine others on that searing day in May 1970.

As usual, the truth makes a less inspiring story than the progressive myth. Those armed agitators created the atmosphere that got their fellow students injured and killed, and left young soldiers with the lives of fellow Americans on their consciences. Needless to say, these troublemakers were never brought to justice.

Stop being juveniles,” a Lindsay aide, Donald Evans, admonished a construction worker.

“What do you mean, being a juvenile?” he replied, punching Mr. Evans on the chin.

And right after my blog marks “Kent State Day,” I celebrate the Hard Hat Riot. This year, I even got to include rarely seen photos taken on the scene, by a Marxist-turned-conservative photographer who now, like me, lives in Toronto.

I know: I’m a bit of a bore about this mostly forgotten 1970 incident, but my fascination with it pre-dates the Tea Party movement — in which, forty years on, I hear echoes of the energy and attitude that sparked the Hard Hat Riot. If only they’d had talk radio and the internet back then.

On May 8, 1970, New York mayor John Lindsay order all flags on city buildings lowered to half staff, in memory of the students who’d died in the Kent State shootings four days earlier.

Construction workers at the World Trade Center building site got wind of the plan. When anti-war protester assembled at the George Washington statue on Wall Street that day — complete with Viet Cong flags — they faced a crowd of “suits” and hard hats who’d spontaneously forces against the hippies.

By noon, more than 1,000 people had gathered and the vigil had escalated to a rally, and about 200 construction workers had had enough. They made signs reading things like “America, Love it or Leave it” and got right up against the police line that separated them from the students. They obeyed it for a few minutes, but the tension got to be too much and the construction workers started chasing the students through the street, beating some of them severely with fists, clubs and crowbars. The construction worker mob fought their way into City Hall and demanded that the flag be raised to full mast again — it had been lowered to half mast to honor the dead at Kent State. Fearful of further damage from the mob, the Deputy Mayor ordered the flag to be raised. The riot eventually fizzled out on its own. Six arrests were made and more than 70 people were injured.

I can’t help but think of the Hard Hat Riot when I hear about construction workers protesting the Ground Zero mosque. What about you?

...crowds at the hastily organized “One Nation” rally “were less dense”...

Either a misprint or a deliberate attack at Glenn's gathering.

Has anyone heard any estimates on how many people actually showed up at the CPUSA sponsored rally in DC? Looked pretty sparse to me from what I saw.

There was no murder at Altamont.

Alan Passaro was acquitted of murder by a jury of his peers, who apparently accepted his attorney's arguments of self-defense - since Meredith Hunter was caught on film drawing and aiming a revolver at the stage before Passaro stabbed him.

Organizers insisted the rally wasn’t partisan and said the message was about job creation, quality education and justice.

And yet I saw transcripts and video from several speakers and they were most definitely going on about the evil republicans, and the evil conservatives and promoted democrats...so if by not partisan you mean they were hyper-partisan, then sure, they weren't partisan....in a liberal up meaning down sort of way.

It was about communism, completing the ruination of America, promotion of homosexuals and evil progressiveness, permissiveness, abortion, death to old geezers and legalizing cocaine and marijuana.

In short, it was just a family fun fest!

This is a great article...thanks for posting it! I found the information about Kent State particularly relevant. That is what these people are about.

During a 60s “student” protest at Howard University, Hattie McDaniel’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar from “Gone With the Wind” was stolen, another proud moment for leftists. It’s still missing.

Two of the four people killed at Kent State weren’t at the anti-war protest...they were in a parking lot which happened to be in the line of fire. Maybe they should have had the sense to stay away from the campus given what had been going on, but they seem to have been just going about their daily lives without any involvement in the protest.

Good info on the happenings at Kent State. Sometime between 1980 and 1983, there was a movie of the week on TV about Kent State.

I was watching it at a friends apartment, and after it was over, one of my friends, a newly commissioned 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Army, made the following comment.

Typical National Guard action...hundreds of rounds fired, and only four dead.

As I get older, that line gets funnier.

One of THE BEST articles I’ve read in a long time!
Well done exposing corruption and connecting the
progressive dots.

As a child of the seventies, I was always suspect of the “glorification” of the events of Sixties.(The most overrated, self absorbed, self destructive generation on American History, A band of Babies)

Especially Woodstock(adults wallowing in their own filth like swine) and Kent State(What lead up to the Guard firing upon “innocent” students).
This article only confirms my long standing bias that the “Victor writes the History”
And “those who write History controls the future”

I’ll be doggone!

I just googled it and did some reading up. It’s true! The Hell’s Angel in question—Allen Passaro—WAS tried and acquitted. There was no good reason this Meredith Hunter guy should have pulled that gun in the middle of all those people.

It is indeed interesting that the MSM never mentions by name the two participants in the incident. Sort of like the way they have always been careful to say as little about RFK’s assasin, the Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, and HIS background.

I’m with you. My dad was career Navy, and we were overseas between 1967 and 1971. As a kid, I absolutely hated the antiwar movement and the hippie culture, although that didn’t stop me from having longer hair and wanting bell-bottom jeans (my parents wouldn’t buy them for me, I had to wait until I was a sailor to get them...:)

When we moved back to the states, in 1972 I was in a class, and my teacher was making us listen to “Ohio” by CSNY...I was in the eighth grade at the time, and I was frikking steaming about being forced to sit and listen to that crap.

I hate the Left in all of its forms...

I read once that there is a school in Cuba named "Los Martires de Kent" in honor of the four dead.

We'll probably never have an accurate count of los martires de Fidel--all of those killed by his regime or died in the attempt to escape.

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