Is DeBlasio A Communist?

DeBlasio signed the pro Sandanista document above.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was previously named "Warren Wilhelm Jr." and once supported the socialist government of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

De Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr. in Manhattan in to an Italian-American mother and a German American father. For reasons unknown, he has always gone by Bill.

Both were highly-educated - Warren Wilhelm Sr. had degrees from both Harvard and Yale and Maria De Blasio went to Smith College.

Before De Blasio was born, both his parents had worked for the federal government, but had to flee Washington after being accused of being communists.

When De Blasio was a few years old, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University.

But life in the Wilhelm house was not happy. His father was a war hero who lost a leg to a Japanese grenade while serving in the Pacific during the Second World War.

When De Blasio was seven, his father suddenly left the family. Warren Sr. was battling alcoholism, which De Blasio believes was a result of the horrors he saw in war. In 1979, when De Blasio was still a teenager, Warren Sr. committed suicide. 

After his father's death, he changed his last name from Wilhelm to his mother's maiden name: De Blasio.

He told New York magazine: 'She was often very, very sad about thing that had happened to her, but she had a fierce resilience - a very sharp and purposeful resilience. She was very practical.'

New Yorkers have welcomed the presence of Bill De Blasio's wife Chirlane McCray.

'All I can say is buckle your seat belt. Get ready for Chirlane McCray,' he told a crowd last month. McCray is indeed different the the other spouses who have lived in Gracie Mansion. For starters, she's a black former lesbian.

When her family moved to Longmeadow, Massacushuetts, where she grew up, they were the second black family in the area and neighbors started a petition to get them to move out.

'I walked in with my African dress and my nose ring, and Bill heard choirs singing.' Bill persisted in courting her and McCray said she fell in love. They married two years later in 1994. Daughter Chiara was born six months later.

When De Blasio was in the college in the 1980s, he made a trip to Nicaragua. The Central American nation was in the midst of a bloody civil war between the Soviet-backed socialist Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed rightist Contras.

De Blasio initially said he visited the capital of Managua on a relief mission to hand out supplies to war refugees.

However, once there, he grew to admire the communist regime, which President Ronald Reagan was attempting to help overthrow.

On his return, he joined the Nicaragua Solidarity Movement of Greater New York, which had a goal to 'end capitalism and replace it with democratic socialism.

His support for the Sandinistas, who were accused of slaughtering hundreds of innocent civilians and 'disappearing' political opponents, became an issue on the mayor's campaign trail.

Republican Joe Lohda said "Mr De Blasio’s involvement with the Sandinistas didn’t happen in 1917; it happened 70 years later when the cruelty and intrinsic failure of communism had become crystal clear to anyone with a modicum of reason." Mr De Blasio’s class warfare strategy in New York City is directly out of the Marxist playbook. Now we know why.'

De Blasio didn't shy away from his past political views, saying he was 'very proud' of his activism on Nicaragua. 'I think at that time, United States policy towards Central America was wrong,' he said in September. 'I think most Americans came to believe it was wrong. I was proud to be an activist working against it.'

It was also revealed that in 1994, he and his wife Chirlane McCray, honeymooned in communist Cuba - at a time when it was illegal for Americans to travel there. It was a fact that De Blasio and McCray didn't even tell their two teenage children.

The archived minutes of a meeting of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network, a group whose meetings de Blasio last attended in 1991, list, in shorthand, “end capitalism and replace with democratic socialism tomorrow” as an immediate goal. But the notes do not attribute the comment to de Blasio himself.