Captain Onofre Gutierrez did not survive communism. He escaped it by a year. He grew up in Nicaragua under the Somoza dictatorship, left for good in October 1978, and watched from the United States as the Sandinistas took the capital in July 1979 with people he loved still inside. In this Surviving Communism interview with Jenny Beth Martin, he explains how a country traded one dictator for another, what happened to the family who stayed, and how a young man who moved to Long Beach with $350 worked three jobs, paid for flight school one hour at a time, and became an airline captain whose name is on the Smithsonian's Wall of Honor. Then he turns to the Democratic Socialists of America, college debt, and the young Americans he mentors, and tells them what his own country learned too late.
Guest: Captain Onofre Gutierrez, a retired airline captain who was born in Nicaragua, left in 1978, and became an American citizen. He is a member of the Surviving Communism panel. Part of the Surviving Communism series.
Today's topics:
• Growing up under the Somoza dictatorship as the son of a radio journalist and Associated Press correspondent, where the unwritten rule was that you never criticized the ruling family
• The 1972 Managua earthquake: relief aid that never reached the people who needed it, and how the Sandinistas used the anger
• Who the Sandinistas are: Augusto Sandino, the United States Marines, the National Guard, and the young Marxists who took a dead man's name and went recruiting in the universities
• Daniel Ortega's path from a Somoza jail to Cuba and back, and why Gutierrez calls him the new Somoza
• July 19, 1979: the Sandinistas take Managua, and friends at the Miami airport tell his father he is on the list
• No tribunals: what his uncle, who served in the air force and was jailed after the revolution, told the family about the reprisals
• From one dictator to another: one backed by the United States, the next by Russia and Cuba, and now contracts with China
• Gutierrez says the Ortega family runs the country's trade deals, its telecommunications, and its oil
• A cousin still in Nicaragua who will not talk politics on the phone because someone may be listening
• October 1978: a letter asking Somoza to step down, three radio stations, and the last flight to Costa Rica with father and son seated apart
• The view from the airplane window: "This is the last time I'm going to see my country"
• Years waiting on a political asylum hearing, a green card under President Reagan's amnesty law, and a letter months later telling him to deport himself
• Long Beach with $350: three jobs, a mattress on the floor, a one-dollar Christmas tree, and $30 for every hour of flight time
• Why he told his cousin's children that America is the only country where you can make money from trash, and what they did next
• College debt, tenure, trade school, and what he calls chasing a paycheck when you meant to chase a career
• His closing warning: fuel prices can come down, but once communism gets in you cannot get rid of it
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The Jenny Beth Show airs live Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM ET. Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Subscribe for daily analysis of politics, policy, and the fight for constitutionally limited government. teapartypatriots.org
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