Sean Penn was Hugo Chavez’s guest of honor (again) last week, serving as keynote speaker at graduation ceremonies for Venezuela’s Salvador Allende Medical School. “Allow me to impart a little anecdote,” beamed the two-time Oscar winner to the enchanted crowd. “I had the privilege to introduce my children to comandante Fidel Castro and as he posed for a photo between them I told him: ‘President, I’ll now be denounced in the U.S. for educating my children as socialist revolutionaries.’”
So Castro responded: “That’s among the best things that could happen to them.”
Besides his fame as a baseball bat-swinging wife beater, Sean Penn also claims fame as an advocate against the death penalty. His Oscar–winning role in “Dead Man Walking,” where he played a convicted rapist and murderer who perished by lethal-injection in Louisiana seems to have made a deep impression upon Penn.
Unlike Louisiana’s penal system, however, the role model for Penn’s kids used firing squads, forced labor and prison beatings to murder his thousands of defenseless victims. And their “convictions” were curtly explained by Castro’s chief hangman, Che Guevara: “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute from revolutionary conviction,” he once said.
Castro himself confirmed: “Legal proof is impossible to obtain against war criminals. So we sentence them based on moral conviction.”
Among these “war criminals” were farm-kids younger than Penn’s children. Carlos Machado was 15-years-old in 1963 when a volley from Castro’s firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father crumpled beside Carlos from the same volley and tumbled into the same mass grave. All had resisted Castro and Che’s theft of their humble family farm, all refused blindfolds and all died sneering at their Communist murderers, as did thousands of their valiant countrymen.
This “moral conviction” allowed the role model for Sean Penn’s children to jail more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin and murder more people (out of a population of 6.5 million) in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered (out of a population of 65 million) in his first six.
Enlightened opinion, including most “liberal,” “human-rights” and “peace” groups worldwide, either yawned or actually applauded the bloodbath. Harvard Law School merits special attention regarding the latter.
By April 1959, almost a thousand Cubans had been “judged” (see above) and murdered by Castro and Che’s firing squads. Cuba’s prisons were packed to suffocation with ten times the number of political prisoners as during “the Tyrant” Batista’s reign. Among Castro and Che Guevara’s prisoners were hundreds of women, a Stalinist horror utterly unknown in our hemisphere until it was introduced by the “leader” swooned over by Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell and Diane Sawyer.
Furthermore, the death penalty was being applied retroactively (none had existed under the unspeakable Batista regime). Habeas Corpus had been abolished. Cuban defense lawyers attempting to defend the accused were being jailed themselves.
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