1619 Project Founder: Cuba ‘Most Equal’ Nation Because Of Socialism

The founder of the controversial 1619 Project, which contends America is inherently racist, regarded totalitarian Cuba as the most “equal” country in the Western hemisphere and a model of integration because of its socialist government.

Nikole Hannah-Jones was asked by Ezra Klein of Vox and the New York Times in a 2019 podcast if there were any places with a “viable and sufficiently ambitious integration agenda,” FoxNews.com reported.

And socialism is the reason for its success, she declared.

“The most equal multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” Hannah-Jones said. “Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people anyplace really in the hemisphere. I mean, the Caribbean, most of the Caribbean it’s hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small. A lot of those countries are run by black folks. But in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality.

“And that’s largely due to socialism,” she added, “which I’m sure no one wants to hear.”

She also praised Cuba in an op-ed published by The Oregonian – the Portland daily – in which she insisted the communist nation has many overlooked accomplishments, the National Pulse reported. Among them, she said are a very high literacy rate, a low HIV-infection rate and a “model” universal health care system.

Hannah-Jones also lauded the Cuban revolution for bringing about an “end of codified racism” and implementing universal education and access to jobs for black Cubans.

Her 1619 Project series, published by the New York Times, contends the United States was founded on slavery, regarding it as the defining characteristic of the American experience.

Last week, videos surfaced showing Cuba’s communist regime brutally repressing anti-government demonstrators. On July 11, protesters took to the streets across the nation waving American flags, and shouting “freedom” and “down with the dictatorship” in the biggest public demonstrations in nearly three decades. By the evening, police had put down demonstrations in Havana, but they continued Tuesday in other parts of the island.

‘Simply no evidence’

In April, as WND reported, the Biden administration proposed offering grants for K-12 history classes that teach the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, the Marxist-based academic doctrine that divides the world into the oppressors vs. the oppressed. Any white person, according to the theory, is de facto an oppressor.

Biden immediately eliminated President Trump’s 1776 Commission. The Biden administration called the report the commission released just prior to Biden’s inauguration “counterfactual.”

With the aim of restoring education on America and its founding, the 1776 report argues that while the country “has its imperfections, just like any other country, in the annals of history the United States has achieved the greatest degree of personal freedom, security, and prosperity for the greatest proportion of its own people and for others around the world.”

“These results are the good fruit of the ideas the founding generation expressed as true for all people at all times and places.”

Last October, two members of the 1776 Commission, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson, were among the professors, academics and historians who signed a letter urging the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind its award to Hannah-Jones for her 1619 Project.

Posted on the website of the National Association of Scholars, the letter asserts there is “simply no evidence” for her claim that “protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution.”

The New York Times’ own fact-checker, Leslie M. Harris, the scholars point out, has “warned the newspaper that an assertion that ‘the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America’ was plainly false.”