UFC fighter Jorge Masvidal slammed former NFL player turned political activist Colin Kaepernick for wearing a T-shirt supportive of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
In a post to his Instagram story Friday, Masvidal, who has voiced his support for freedom protesters in Cuba, called Kaepernick a “coward” who doesn’t understand history because he wore the T-shirt in 2016.
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“Know [your] history and facts,” Masvidal wrote alongside a picture of the former football player. “[C]owards like this fool should be sent to live in Cuba[.] See what they say after a day there.”
The photo the fighter shared is from 2016, when Kaepernick donned a T-shirt featuring photos of a meeting between Castro and activist Malcolm X. At the bottom of the shirt was the phrase, “Like minds think alike.”
Kaepernick, when asked about the T-shirt, praised Castro for Cuba’s educational system, saying, “One thing that Fidel Castro did is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here, even though we’re fully capable of doing that.”
He later tried tempering his language, saying it’s “not true” to “push the narrative that I was supportive of the oppressive things he did.”
Masvidal’s condemnation of Kaepernick comes as he and other Cuban-American celebrities and politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have called on the U.S. to offer robust support to freedom protesters in the communist country.
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Cuban-born pop star Gloria Estefan said the Cuban people “need our support [and] that of the democratic [and] free countries of the world.”
“The United Nations [and], very especially, the United States, must strongly condemn the repressive [and] violent measures being taken by the Cuban government against their own people,” she wrote in an Instagram post last week. “Spread the images, spread the word.”
Rapper Pitbull, whose real name is Armando Christian Pérez, said in an explicit video of his own, “We need to stand up, step up, and if you don’t understand what’s going on, then you need to wake the [expletive] up. Not only is this a Cuban event, Cuban thing — this is a world event. This isn’t about politics, this is about saving lives. This is about unity, not division, and the bottom line this is about taking action.”
As for Masvidal, he described the repressive Cuban government as a “killing machine” and said he will use his platform “to do what I feel is correct — what I feel like everybody should be doing — [which] is fighting against oppression, dictatorships, communism, and anything of that nature.”
“I want to shed some light on Cuba,” Masvidal said in the minute-long video, peppering his comments with explicit language. “[T]his oppression has been going on for 61 years. It’s not just because of the pandemic or it’s not just because they just ran out of medicine, because they’ve been out of medicine; they’ve been out of resources and food, because of the corrupt government, the extreme corruption over there where only a few at the top eat and everybody else just has to suffer.”
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