“I have been affiliated with the Cuban Council of Churches since the 1980s,” boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006.

I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project’s trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades.

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“Non-partisan,” Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuba Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba’s ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba’s DGI, Cuba’s secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI. The ICAP’s long-time chieftain was Rene Cruz Rodriguez, perhaps one of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “friends.”

Rodriguez’ meteoric rise through Cuba’s Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out Che Guevara and Raul Castro themselves in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim’s skull with a coup d’ grace from his .45. Here’s dramatic proof of Rene Cruz Rodriguez’ zeal as a Castroite executioner.

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On Nov. 5, 1982 a Dade County, Fla., grand jury indicted Rene Rodriguez Cruz for smuggling drugs into the U.S.

This murderer headed a Cuban agency that Jeremiah Wright “worked with for decades” by his own admission, and whose staff he regards as “friends.” These “friends,” arranged the visit for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s and his 300-person entourage to Havana in 1984, which included Rev. Wright.

“Viva Fidel!” bellowed Reverend Jackson while concluding his speech at the University of Havana during that visit while arm in arm with Fidel Castro. “Viva Che Guevara!” roared Jackson. “Long live our cry of freedom!”

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“He (Jesse Jackson) is a great personality,” reciprocated a beaming Fidel Castro, “a brilliant man with a great talent, capable of communicating with people, very persuasive, reliable, honest. Jackson’s main characteristic is honesty. He is sincere and there is not a single bit of demagoguery in his conversations.”

During Jesse Jackson’s odes to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, by the way, the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner suffered his tortures in stoic and heroic silence just a few miles away.

He’s what Castroites call a plantado–a defiant one, an unbreakable one. “Stalin tortured,” wrote Arthur Koestler, “not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.”

“The worst part of Communism,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “is being forced to live a lie.”

Eusebio Peñalver refused to collude in this lie. He spit in the face of the liars. He scorned any “re-education” by his jailers. He knew it was they who desperately needed it. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew it was theywho should don it. Charles Rangel, Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright all toast his torturer. But through almost 30 years of those tortures Eusebio Peñalver stood tall, proud and defiant.

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He died in 2006.