Already engulfed in a controversy over refusing to stand during the National Anthem, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick drew more ire during a press conference when the wore a Fidel Castro T-shirt.
After the press conference he was criticized for wearing the t-shirt depicting Castro, the longtime communist dictator of Cuba, and Malcolm X, captioned: “Like Minds Think Alike.”
“There is no question that racial inequality needs to be a topic of conversation in the United States. But that gets us back to Cuba, where such conversations can get you in prison,” wrote Orlando Sentinel sports columnist George Diaz on Tuesday, who said his family left the communist country in 1961.
A Cuban man, Sergio Sixto, who was imprisoned and tortured by Castro’s communist regime also wasn’t pleased with Kaepernick’s choice of attire.
“If that guy had a dictator like the Castro’s for 57 years in power in his country, he would know what it’s like to really be oppressed. Especially for black people. Black people are the most repressed in the country. The prisons are filled with them mostly,” he told the Independent Journal.
“There are more than 100 thousand people in Cuba that died in Cuba because of the Castros. There are 3 million people in exile from the country. If he would know what it’s like living in Cuba, he would know what it’s like to be an oppressed black man,” Sixto added.
And if Kaepernick protested in the way that he had on Friday, it would have been dire for him, Sixto noted.
“If he had said anything bad to say about the government or the Castros in protest of real discrimination and oppression, he might have found himself in prison like I did for trying to speak my mind and bring about change. And he would have been treated even worse,” he said.
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