His dad was a founder of the Communist Party of Puerto Rico, and Ismael was forced to listen to 7-hour speeches by Fidel Castro (Communist dictator of Cuba). But he soaked it up and admired his dad. "I wanted that kind of steel, that kind of commitment for a cause, and I eventually joined the party with him."
But his life experience started to change his philosophy when he went to school "in the guts of “the monster", at the University of Southern Mississippi. A self-described black Puerto Rican communist, he was surprised when he earned a full scholarship for his grades.
"As a socialist I believed my only value was to be a faithful soldier of revolution . . If I do my duty, my life has value. . What matters is the collective, the group; but America tells me no, you have value as a person. That was a discovery, and I also discovered that what Americans call poverty is a joke compared to what we call poverty in any other context in the world. That was another problem for me, because this was not the America that socialism told me existed."
(cont'd tomorrow)
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