Ron Ridenour
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Born in the “devil’s own country” of a WASP military career father, I sought the “American Dream” until I entered the Air Force, in 1956, to fight the “commies”. Here, I witnessed approved segregated barracks in the Yankee base it established in Japan, and imposition of racism in Japanese establishments. I protested and was tortured by my white “compatriots”. This, and the fact that we had orders to shoot down any Soviet aircraft over “our” territory in Japan—which never appeared—while we flew spy planes over the Soviet Union daily, led me to question American “morality”.
The first time I exercised my democratic right to demonstrate was in Los Angeles, where I protested with others the Yankee invasion of Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs. Cuba’s revolution, and my hate for racism, led me to become a radical then a revolutionary.

During the early 1960s, I was a college student and joined the budding student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and supported liberation movements by blacks, browns, native Americans, and women, and revolutionary movements throughout Latin American and Africa.
In the mid-70s, the Southeast Asians, aided by international solidarity movements, won its sovereignty. Soon thereafter, I obtained 1,000 censored pages of dossiers various National Security Council “intelligence” agencies had on me. Some of this will form part of an upcoming manuscript.
I began working as a reporter in 1967. I was fired from three dailies for failing to self-censor my reportage and for union organizing efforts, as well as support for the Black Panthers. In the early 1970s, I reported and edited several alternative, “underground” weeklies, including the “Los Angeles Free Press” and the “L.A. Vanguard”.

FBI, CIA, Los Angeles Police Department's red squad all tailed and harrassed me, even to the point of forging tax return papers in an attempt to show the left and anti-war movement that I was one of their many spies.
During the 1960s and 70s, I was jailed a dozen times, once for half-a-year, and spent a week in a Costa Rica prison for trying to travel to Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis. In 1980, I moved to Denmark for love of Grethe and hate of the US. Between 1982 and 1996, I traveled to and lived for several years in Nicaragua and Cuba, where I translated, wrote and edited for Cuba’s foreign publishing house, Editorial José Martí, and Cuba's news agency, Prensa Latina.

I have also written for many Danish publications. I have worked in ecological agricultural, lecturing in schools, painting houses and many other odd jobs in Denmark.

My books are: "Cuba at Sea"; "Cuba. Beyond the Crossroads"; "Cuba: A “Yankee” Reports", "Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn"; "Cuba at the Crossroads"; "Yankee Sandinistas". Co-author: "Revolutionære Visioner"; "Eyes See What Eyes Want to See: Western Media and the Peace Movement"; "Mood Pictures from a Central American Peace March, "Glass House Tapes".

Besides having worked as reporter and or an editor for several US newspapers and magazines (Hanford Sentinel, Riverside Press-Enterprise, Los Angeles Free Press, Los Angeles Vanguard...), I have been a special correspondent or free lance for many other publications in the US, several Latin American and European countries—among them: The Morning Star, New Statesman, The Guardian (US and England), Playboy, Liberation News Service, Pacific News Service and Pacifica Radio, Coast, Qui, Skeptic, Sevendays; Copenhagen weekly Politisk Review weekly, Relief, Information…


Copyright © 2006-2008 Ronridenour.com

About Ron Ridenour