Twersky’s sources were alarmed because the educator, Johnnetta Cole, while widely admired as president of Spellman College, had nonetheless once been on the national committee of the Venceremos Brigades, which brought young people to help harvest sugar in Castro’s Cuba and which, according to the New York Times, the FBI had maintained was connected with Cuban intelligence. She had also been on the national committee of the United States Peace Council, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, which was regarded by the FBI as a communist front.Having read of Cole’s nomination, I immediately recognized her name as an individual well known as an avid supporter of both the Soviet Union, its foreign policy, and as a person active in political campaigns run by the American Communist Party. Indeed, she had publicly put her name on a rabid anti-American screed issued by the U.S. Peace Council.

Johnnetta Cole, the constantly honored former president of Spelman College, said, “What impressed me most [about meeting Castro] was the way in which his grounding in the history and reality of Afro-Cubans informs his view of Cuba; the sense of personal outrage he has over racial discrimination.”