Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/12/2026
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Categories
How I Came to Question the Cold War
Our speaker, Unitarian Universalist Rachel Bruhnke, has lived and worked in Central and South America over an extended period, and has watched and studied, ultimately questioning what she had been taught. Rachel introduces the subject here:
The first time I ever saw Cuba I realized that the entire Cold War was a lie. The Trump Administration’s attacks on the Left whether at home or internationally against socialist Cuba and Venezuela, is the continuation of a hundred years of this nasty criminal U.S. Cold War that was never cold and was never ever ended. The best way to defend against Trump’s fascist blitzkrieg is to fight his political fire with our own political fire.
Speaker Biography: Rachel Bruhnke has been a member of the Pacific Unitarian Church in Palos Verdes since 2005. An area high school teacher, she earned her M.S. in Environmental Resource Engineering from CSU Humboldt researching the Energy Transition of Cuba after the breakup of the Socialist trading block led by the Soviet Union. She received her B.A. in Political Science with an emphasis in Latin American Affairs from CSU Long Beach during the Reagan wars against Central America, and studied at La Catolica University in Lima, Peru, traveling extensively in the Southern Cone during the post–Dirty War era.
Rachel lived in Honduras as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later specialized in development exchange work in Ecuador and Costa Rica. She has traveled to Cuba for more than 25 years for work and studies, and marvels at the Cuban peoples’ achievements in human and environmental sustainability. After the demise of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the first election of Donald Trump, Rachel founded the “Cold War Truth Commission”, a project to help other Americans understand the seminal role that the United States’ global war against communism has had in creating conflict and misery abroad, and at home. Her recent book by the same name is a compilation of 60 testimonies putting the U.S. Cold War on Trial, a project Oliver Stone has called “ideologically right on”.