The head of a radical activist group who urged anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University to channel the deadly Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 is a career agitator who spent “years” in the socialist haven of Cuba, The Post can reveal.
Manolo De Los Santos, the 35-year-old leader of the Midtown-based nonprofit The People’s Forum (TPF), came to The Bronx from his native Dominican Republic at age 5 and has made a career of spurring protests on the streets of New York City.
He first traveled to Cuba in 2006 and was there as recently as March to demand an end to the US blockade against the socialist state which has been in place since 1962.
As TPF’s executive director and de facto mouthpiece — a role he’s held since 2018, according to his Facebook — the writer, organizer and public speaker is as known for his zealous support of left-wing causes as he is for his repugnant public statements.
De Los Santos, who declined to speak to The Post when approached outside his Hell’s Kitchen home Monday, has in the last year alone hailed Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack as “heroic,” called for Israel to be “erased from history” and eagerly welcomed the impending “defeat” of the “US empire.”
He has been a longtime advocate for Cuba, which he first visited as a teenager with a progressive religious group called Pastors for Peace and which he was later based out of for “many years.”
When he wasn’t denouncing “US hegemony” from the shores of Cuba, De Los Santos was causing trouble across the Big Apple, participating in numerous disruptive street protests and giving provocative speeches laced with incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric.
“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel, when the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism in our lifetime,” De Los Santos said in January in front of a cheering crowd in a now-viral video.
His remarks were so vicious that South Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) denounced the speech as “Nazi rhetoric,” and called for Goldman Sachs, whose philanthropy arm used to direct funds to TPF, to cut ties with the organization — which also has links to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Thousands of Israelis were massacred, maimed, mutilated, abducted, raped, and tortured at the murderous hands of Hamas,” Torres wrote, referring to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
“[Hamas] espouses the kind of genocidal ideology that The People’s Forum has been caught promoting as ‘the final blow,’ which is strikingly similar to Nazi rhetoric about a ‘final solution,’” he continued.
Shortly after, De Los Santos penned a defiant missive on the TPF website in which he refused to apologize and dismissed the media’s labeling of his words as hate speech as “a propaganda trick by the apologists for genocide.”
Less than two weeks later, on Jan. 27, De Los Santos was among 10 protest leaders cops busted on a day of anarchy across the city in which hundreds of anti-Israel demonstrators descended on Manhattan, partially blocking the Brooklyn Bridge and attempting to “flood” JFK Airport in Queens.
In between street marches and railing against the evils of capitalism, De Los Santos uses his extensive social media presence — which includes more than 31,000 followers on X — to post glory shots of Hamas members accompanied by reverent missives lauding the terror group’s actions.
On Oct. 7, the day Hamas launched its bloody terror attack against Israel that killed more than 1,200 men, women and children, De Los Santos shared a Hamas propaganda video showing terrorist paratroopers gearing up for the cowardly assault against the Jewish home state.
A few weeks later as the battle in Gaza raged on, he posted an image of Hamas fighters raising automatic weapons in celebration.
“Victory to those who resist Zionism! Victory to those who fight as the bombs fall in Gaza! Victory to those who defend their people from Israel’s war crimes! Victory to all who mobilize, march & act in solidarity with Palestine! Resistance until Victory! Palestine will win!” he wrote accompanying the image.
Reached by email late Monday afternoon, De Los Santos didn’t directly address any of The Post’s questions about what if any role he played in fomenting campus unrest at Columbia.
Instead he offered a deflective statement rejecting characterizations that the campus protests were violent, blaming the police for being the true “source of the violence.”
He also praised student demonstrators for their “courage” in risking “suspension, expulsion, arrest, loss of housing and so much more.”
“They are seeing their own schools and tuition money supporting an ongoing genocide and doing everything they can to stop it.”
