Members of the Cuban community in Louisville, Kentucky, held a rally supporting a local immigrant-owned restaurant that was reportedly threatened by Black Lives Matter protesters.
Dozens of rallygoers stood in the city’s NuLu district, which is known for its locally owned establishments, to push back against demands that businesses in the area hire more black employees.
“We’re here to work. We’re dreamers. We’re people who love freedom and love this country,” rally organizer, business owner, and Cuban immigrant Fernando Martinez said about Cuban Americans. “This is not a race fight. This is an idea fight.”
Martinez is a partner of the Olé Restaurant Group, which was one of dozens of businesses in the NuLu district that received a letter from Black Lives Matter protesters demanding more black people be represented in the restaurants and shops in protest of gentrification in the area. The list of demands, which protesters want business owners to sign, calls for diversity training, businesses to match representation of black employees with the city’s population (23%), and donations of 1.5% of revenue to Black Lives Matter on a monthly basis.
Martinez said he was confronted by a group of protesters last week outside his restaurant, La Bodeguita de Mima. He has said on social media that protesters making demands were using “mafia tactics” to bully businesses into acquiescing.
“There comes a time in life that you have to make a stand, and you have to really prove your convictions and what you believe in,” Martinez wrote in a Facebook post. “… All good people need to denounce this. How can you justified (sic) injustice with more injustice?”
A press release on the rally said his business “has been subject to vandalism and extortion in recent days,” according to the Courier Journal.
Rally attendees, many of whom were white and black, as well as people with Cuban and Venezuelan heritage, held signs reading, “No 2 Socialism in America,” “Justice 4 All,” “We Are Peaceful People But Don’t Tread On Us.”
“That was another thing that was upsetting: You’re attacking a Black/brown establishment, but you’re in the name of Black Lives Matter,” Ahamara Brewster, general of the Revolutionary Black Panther Party of Kentucky and speaker at the rally, said. “Something’s weird about this.”
Martinez was vocal in his condemnation of communism and said he escaped Cuba for the United States for freedom. His comments stand in defiance of remarks from Black Lives Matter movement’s co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, who said back in 2015 that she and other members are “trained Marxists.”
“With the internet nowadays, you’re easily and quickly discounted and disqualified. ‘Oh, you don’t agree with everything I believe? You’re a racist, you’re a bigot, and that’s that,’” he said. “There’s people out there trying to define me as a man and trying to define my business, and they don’t know who we are.”
An antiracist activist in the area, Talesha Wilson, told a local reporter that the rally at La Bodeguita was “childish.”
A similar incident unfolded in Omaha, Nebraska, earlier this summer when a restaurant permanently closed after protesters demanded an item on its menu named after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee be changed and for the restaurant to donate money to black organizations. 11-Worth Cafe management shut its doors in June after protesters reportedly sent “numerous threats” to their family members.
“Our customers and staff are of the utmost importance to our family,” a letter from management read. “The verbal abuse, taunting and having to be escorted to and from their cars by police and security officers for their safety for two straight days was more than we could watch them endure.”
