Ernesto “Che” Guevara scorned Mexicans as “a rabble of illiterate Indians,” jailed artists at a higher rate than Stalin, co-founded the terrorist movement that pulled off among the first and deadliest airplane hijackings in the Western Hemisphere, and craved to nuke the USA.

In November 1958, Cubana Airlines Flight 495 from Miami to Varadero was hijacked at gunpoint by terrorists belonging to Castro and Che’s July 26^th Movement. The plane crashed in Cuba killing 14 passengers. Che’s glowing face now greets all passengers preparing to board at Reno-Tahoe Airport. How very thoughtful of airport officials.

Actually, in the interest of historical accuracy, I should clarify that Che Guevara’s anti-American bloodlust could have been slaked only by nuking the American patrons of this American airport born before 1962.  So he mostly craved to nuke the parents and grandparents of the Americans who patronize, run and fund Reno-Tahoe International Airport. This obviously includes those who awarded 1st place in the airport’s employee Art contest to the Che Guevara iconography now on prominent display.

An American of Cuban heritage who lives in Nevada has complained about the painting, but as usual, to no avail.  “Artistic freedom” trumped him to a pulp, as explained by an airport spokesman. “The painting of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara will remain on display through May 9 with the other nearly 100 items in the employee art exhibit,” said airport spokesman Brian Kulpin.

Reno-Tahoe airport passengers will be comforted to know that an airport employee feels the same affection for the hemisphere’s Godfather of airplane hijackings that Leonardo da Vinci felt for Mona Lisa and Andy Warhol for Marilyn Monroe.

And needless to add, if an American of African heritage complained about a picture of, say, former KKK  chieftain David Duke (who killed nobody and hijacked no planes) in the same place  it would be ceremoniously taken down and perhaps ceremoniously hurled in a dumpster or burned. Artistic freedom be double-damned.

Then whoever put it up would run the gauntlet of media inquisitions, groveling apologies at every stop. And he’d still probably lose his job.

“I am here on my knees,” he whimpered. “I am here to say I am sorry with my heart in my hands…I hurt a lot of people’s feelings. Now I want to apologize because I did the wrong thing. It was a very stupid comment…This is the biggest mistake so far in my life. If I don’t learn from this mistake, then I will call myself dumb.”

As if hailing a Stalinist dictator who jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin himself during the Great Terror, murdered more Cubans than Hitler murdered Germans during the Night of Long Knives, repeatedly craved to nuke Ozzie’s adopted country, and shattered the lives of half of Miami’s families were some kind of offense in this country! (Except for ticket-sales.)

Many luminaries in the Democratic Party and mainstream media must be snickering at the hapless Ozzie Guillen.

Take the very Time Magazine that quoted Guillen’s “respect” for Fidel Castro. In their “Heroes and Icons”  issue Time honors Fidel Castro’s chief hangman Che Guevara as among the most heroic and iconic of the lot, right alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. “This obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor…” starts their eulogy. For the record: no record of Ernesto Guevara’s medical degree exists.

Take two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson.  “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” he bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.

Take Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern: “Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend.”

Take former President of the United States and official “Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter: “Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all — enough to eat, health care, adequate housing and education. Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.”

Take NBC’s Andrea Mitchell: “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!”

Take Dan Rather: “Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis.”

Jim Belushi was basking as master of ceremonies of Cuba’s Cigar Festival, which—while auctioning cigars to millionaire and billionaire businessmen from around the world — raised over one million for the regime that jailed, exiled and murdered most of Cuba’s businessmen. Fidel Castro’s son Tony was chuckling from a ringside seat.

Cuba’s tobacco farmers and cigar makers all had their livelihoods stolen at Soviet gunpoint in 1960. The recalcitrant (i.e. people who balked at having their life’s work stolen by Stalinists) were sent to firing squads, torture chambers, forced labor camps and exile. Shortly afterwards, Cuba’s minister of industries, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “nationalized” and “consolidated” Cuba’s cigar industry.

“Certainly we execute,” beamed Che Guevara at the UN in December 1964. “And we will continue to execute! This is a war to the death against our revolution’s enemies!” Many of these bullet-riddled enemies had simply resisted the armed theft of their family tobacco farms by Che Guevara’s KGB-trained gunmen.

As he chummed it up with regime apparatchiks in Cuba (where the average annual salary is $230), Jim Belushi was fresh from last month’s $38,500-per-plate Obama fundraiser in Beverly Hills where he shared the honors alongside George Clooney.

Note to Jim Belushi’s agent: Your client’s Cuba visit is probably providing more entertainment to many more Cubans than you know, but in more private venues. To wit:

“My job was to bug visiting celebrity’s hotel rooms,” high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez once explained. “With both cameras and listening devices. And famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro’s intelligence.” He continued: “Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself.”

And according to some sources, Havana, given the desperation of its brutalized and impoverished residents, has recently topped Bangkok as the world Mecca for child sex.

“He [Delfin Fernandez] has not only met some of the most famous men in the world,” says the London Daily Mirror about the Cuban defector, “he’s also spied on them and been witness to some of their most innermost secrets.”

The City Council in heavily unionized Galway, where the Labour Party holds a majority, approved the plans for the monument unanimously. But the monument to union-buster Che Guevara was proposed and championed by city Councillor Billy Cameron, who boasts of his credentials as a “trade union activist.”

Cuba’s Stalinist regime (that to this day outlaws trade unionism) will fund the trade union-championed monument.

“By no means can Cuban workers go on strike,” declared Cuba’s “Minister of Industries” on June 26, 1961. “Cuban workers must adjust to life in a collectivist social order.” This Minister of Industries, in case you haven’t guessed, was Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y Lynch, famous “son” of union-loving Galway.

Don’t look for this on NPR or The History Channel, much less in your college textbooks, but among the first, the most militant, and the most widespread opposition groups to the Stalinism Ernesto “Che”  Guevara imposed on Cuba came from Cuban labor groups.

And who can blame them? Here’s a report from the International Labor Organization on Cuba circa 1957: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” it starts. “Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by Social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S.”

In 1958, Cuba had a higher per capita income than Spain, Austria or Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950s, Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco.

For obvious reasons, thousands of these men took up arms against Che Guevara. The MRP (Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo) was among these Cuban resistance groups of mostly laborers. Here’s how the FBI and CIA described them: “Heavily weighted labor membership, with socialistic leanings. Aimed for Castro overthrow from within; advocated nationalization of economy, agrarian reform, social reform.”

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.

Pope Benedict XVI will visit Cuba in March. Two of Italy’s top newspapers are reporting that Fidel Castro will avail himself of the visit to confess his sins and be accepted back into the Catholic Church, which excommunicated him in 1962.

“During this last period, Fidel has come closer to religion,” says Castro’s estranged daughter Alina who lives in Miami. “He has rediscovered Jesus at the end of his life. It doesn’t surprise me because dad was raised by Jesuits.”

A baptized and confirmed Catholic, but lifelong layman, I don’t claim expertise in ecclesiastical matters. But before granting absolution the Catholic Church, I’m fairly sure, still requires contrition—sincere contrition.

On his 1998 visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II remarked that he was “reserving judgment on Che Guevara who had served the poor.” Upon greeting the Cuban ambassador to the Holy See in 2005, this same pontiff hailed Cuba’s “gains in health care and education.” The above makes patently obvious that, on matters Cuban, the Vatican references the same media and academic sources gleefully bestowed Havana bureaus and visas by the Castro regime. Heaven knows the Vatican is not alone on this.

So if the Italian papers are right–and with all due respect to whomever has been tasked with hearing Fidel Castro’s confession and granting his absolution—I offer the following educational items regarding Castro’s historical record of sincerity:

“Cuban mothers let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba’s problems without spilling a drop of blood.” Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones upon entering Havana on January 7, 1959. As the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, Castro continued: “Cuban mothers let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry.”

The following day, just below San Juan Hill in eastern Cuba, a bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position, and pushed dirt into a huge pit with blood pooling at the bottom from the still-twitching bodies of almost a hundred men and boys who’d been machine-gunned without trial on the Castro brothers’ orders. Many of the victims’ mothers, wives and mothers wept hysterically from a nearby road as their loved ones were thus buried, some still alive.

Thousands upon thousands more Cuban men and boys (along with some girls) crumpled before Castro and Che’s firing squads in the days and months and years to come.

“Viva Cristo Rey!”  (Long Live Christ the King) were the last words of many of the martyrs.   Catholic youth groups were among the first to mount resistance to Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinization of Cuba. Tragically for them, in the early ’60s the Castro regime’s KGB mentors were still flush from massacring thousands of Catholic (among many other) freedom-fighters during the Polish, Ukrainian and recent Hungarian rebellions against Soviet rule. Denied U.S. help  (from 90 miles away) while the Soviets (6,000 miles away) lavished their Caribbean satraps with massive firepower and 40,000 “advisors,” Cuba’s anti-Communist rebels fared no better than did those in Eastern Europe.

In the process of extinguishing the freedom-fighters, Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin’s and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed (out of a population of 65 million) in its first six. These figures come from the human rights group Freedom House and from the Black Book of Communism, authored by French scholars and translated into English by Harvard University Press, not exactly headquarters for “the vast-right wing conspiracy,” much less of “right-wing Cuban exile crackpots.”

Last week the regime co-founded by Che Guevara (worldwide icon of youthful rebellion) murdered a young defenseless political prisoner named Wilman Villar for the crime of “disrespect to authorities.”

So 53 years into Cuban Stalinism we’re at about 100,000 Cuban deaths at the hands of the regime and counting.  (All of this 90 miles from U.S. shores, while Havana swarms with mainstream media press bureaus and Hollywood producers, by the way.)

“The Cuban regime is a callous band of murderers that once again has blood on its hands,” said Senator Marco Rubio in a bi-partisan Senate Resolution passed on Jan. 26 in Villar’s honor. “Once again, we are reminded of the unintended but negative consequences of this administration’s loosened travel and remittance policies [to Cuba]. They help deliver more hard currency to the Castro regime, making it easier for them to brutalize and even murder the Cuban people.”

Last November 30-year-old Wilman Villar was peacefully protesting Cuban Stalinism near his home in Eastern Cuba in a sort of “Occupy Santiago de Cuba.” But this protest was more peaceful, less messy and completely devoid of Che Guevara iconography. You’ll notice that this last peculiarity is a historic trademark of people cursed by fate to have actually experienced the handiwork of Che Guevara.

Within minutes of the protest’s commencement the KGB- and STASI-trained police that props up the regime co-founded by Che Guevara swarmed in with billy-clubs and arrested all protestors. None of this newsworthy drama was captured by the mainstream media folks, by the way.  And I repeat: Cuba teems with mainstream press bureaus that report every bruise or hangnail among the prisoners in Guantanamo.

In a New York Times article on the 30^th anniversary of Che’s death, Christopher Hitchens rationalized his (not-so) youthful romance with the Stalinist war-monger and mass-murderer (who became an icon of anti-war and anti-death-penalty groups) by claiming that, “Che was no hypocrite.”  In fact, Che’s monumental hypocrisy—from stealing Cuba’s most luxurious mansion, to whimpering to the New York Times in 1959 that he felt “pained” to be wrongly branded a “Communist”—has been amply documented. But in this case, at least, the late Hitchens has a point:

“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates!” raved Che Guevara in a famous speech in 1961. “The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible!” commanded this icon of flower children. “Instead the young must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”

Youth, wrote Guevara, “should learn to think and act as a mass.” Those who “chose their own path” (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-imperialist rock & roll) were denounced as worthless “delinquents,” and herded into forced labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point.  In a famous speech Che Guevara even vowed, “to make individualism disappear from Cuba!  It is criminal to think of individuals!” he raved.

How easily Romney or Santorum could have enjoyed their “Gingrich in South Carolina Moment!” How easily Gingrich could have basked in another! Debate moderator Brian Williams lobbed it over home plate and not even Gingrich bothered to swing.

But the vital Florida primary, with its vital Cuban-American (the most lopsidedly Republican ethnic group in modern U.S. history) voters, is still a week away. So all is not lost. So should some media smart aleck bring up the the so-called “Cuban embargo” again, here, gentlemen, is how you bash it out of the park:

“What embargo of Cuba, Brian? Can you clarify a little? Or kindly instruct your staff to actually research the issue before they craft these asinine questions?” Here, I’ll even help them:

In executive order after executive order, President Obama abolished President Bush’s travel and remittance restrictions to Castro’s terrorist-sponsoring fiefdom and opened the pipeline to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba today is estimated by Senator Marco Rubio at $4 billion a year.  While a proud Soviet satrapy Cuba received $3-5 billion annually from the Soviets.  You call that an embargo? Find me the dictionary that defines all the above as such.

According to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. has transacted almost $4 billion in trade with Cuba over the past decade. Up until two years ago, the U.S. served as Stalinist Cuba’s biggest food supplier and fifth biggest import partner. We’ve fallen a few notches recently but we’re still in the top half. Furthermore, the U.S. has been Stalinist Cuba’s biggest donor of humanitarian aid, including medicine and medical supplies, for decades.

Here’s more for your notebook: For over a decade the so-called U.S. embargo has merely stipulated that Castro’s Stalinist regime pay cash up front through a third–party bank for all U.S. agricultural products; no Ex-Im (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales. Enacted by the Bush team in 2001, this cash-up-front policy has been monumentally beneficial to U.S. taxpayers, making them among the few in the world not screwed and tattooed by the Castro regime, which per capita-wise qualifies as the world’s biggest debtor nation, with a foreign debt of close to $50 billion, a credit rating nudging Somalia’s and an uninterrupted record of defaults. Standard & Poors refuses even to rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures released by its Stalinist apparatchiks as utterly bogus.

From Kennedy to Carter to Clinton the proof piled up, and it said: playing nice with the Castro brothers only emboldens them to more terrorism abroad and repression at home.  But now, President Obama is playing nicest of all.

The top act at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week featured Mercedes-Benz Chairman Dieter Zetsche peddling his company’s new gadgetry under a huge picture of Che Guevara, who sported the Mercedes logo on his beret. “Viva la Revolucion!” beamed the cheeky Herr Zetsche while unveiling his brilliant ad campaign.

In other words: to sell cars in the U.S., Mercedes-Benz is relying on the mass appeal in the U.S. of the mass-murdering Stalinist who craved to destroy the U.S.

“The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!” once raved Mercedes-Benz new U.S. sales icon.  “Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ [Americans] very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy [Americans] must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him!  We must keep our hatred [against the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysm! If the nuclear missiles had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The solutions to the world’s problems lie behind the Iron Curtain. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”

No doubt Mercedes-Benz chuckles at the ironic cheekiness of using a Communist “man of the people” to tout a luxury product. After all, Time magazine’s encomium to Che Guevara in 1999 as “Hero and Icon of the Century” asserted that: “Nothing could be more vicariously gratifying than Che Guevara’s disdain for material comfort and everyday desires.”

Alas, Time’s (and Mercedes’)  “research” overlooked some important details. In fact, quite unwittingly, Mercedes-Benz has chosen an ideal sales emblem—and one utterly devoid of irony. To wit:

“Che’s mansion was among the most luxurious in Cuba,” wrote Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes in 1960. After a hard day at the office signing firing squad murder warrants and blasting defenseless teenagers’ skulls apart with the coup-de-grâce, Che Guevara retired to his new domicile just outside Havana on the pristine beachfront (today reserved exclusively for tourists and regime apparatchiks). Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba’s most successful building contractor, who escaped Cuba just ahead of a Guevara firing squad. “The mansion had a boat dock, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets,” continues Llano Montes. “One TV had been specially designed in the U.S. and had a screen ten feet wide and was operated by remote control (remember, this was 1959). This was thought to be the only TV of its kind in Latin America. The mansion’s garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights.”

January 7, 1959 marked a milestone in U.S. diplomatic history. Never before had the State Department extended diplomatic recognition to a Latin American government as quickly as it bestowed it on Fidel Castro’s that day.

At the time, Castro himself had yet to enter Havana.

Nothing so frantically fast had been bestowed upon “U.S.-backed” Fulgencio Batista (obligatory prefix, used in every MSM and “scholarly” mention of him) seven years earlier. Batista had in fact been punished by a U.S. arms embargo and heavy diplomatic pressure to resign for a year. Batista was subsequently denied exile in the U.S. and not even allowed to set foot in the country that “backed” him.

On a visit to Cuba in 2001 for a “scholarly summit” with Fidel and Raul Castro, Robert Reynolds — who served as the CIA’s Caribbean desk’s specialist on the Cuban revolution in 1960 — clarified the U.S. diplomatic stance of the time: “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” he boasted to his beaming hosts.

Reynolds’ colleague Robert Weicha, who served as CIA chief in Santiago, Cuba, in the late 1950s, concurred: Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State were pro-Castro, except ambassador Earl T. Smith.

In the fall of ’57, Weicha and U.S. Consul Park Wollam smuggled into Cuba the state-of-the-art transmitters that became Castro and Che’s Radio Rebelde. From these mics, the Castroites broadcast their “guerrilla victories” island-wide, along with their plans to uplift Cuba into a Caribbean Shangri-La inspired by the principles of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and St Francis of Assisi. These proclamations were then reaching most of the English-speaking world through the good work of the New York Times and CBS (Herbert Matthews and Don Hewitt, respectively).

“War against the United States is my true destiny!” Fidel Castro had confided in a letter to a friend in June 1958. “When this war’s over I’ll start that much bigger war.” Alas, this message was not broadcast over the U.S.-issue “Radio Rebelde,” and apparently slipped past our crackerjack CIA.

Within days of recognizing Castro’s regime, the U.S. State Department sacked its Republican ambassador to Cuba, Earl.T. Smith– that insufferable pest mentioned by Weicha. Smith’s unforgivable gaffe was repeatedly warning that supporting the Castro rebels (as we’ve seen, both morally and materially) while pulling the rug out from under Batista was not the shrewdest method of advancing U.S. interests, to say nothing of the interests of the Cuban people.

Months earlier, an alarmed Smith contacted Jim Noel, CIA station chief in Havana, with reports from his Cuban contacts about communist string-pullers existing within Castro’s movement, and about Che Guevara’s well-known communist ties and sympathies. (When arrested in Mexico City in 1956, Guevara was carrying in his pocket the business card of the local KGB agent, who also served as Raul Castro’s KGB handler since 1953.) But Noel could hardly mask his annoyance at the naysaying Republican alarmist:

“Don’t worry, Ambassador,” snapped the typically liberal CIA officer. “We’ve infiltrated Castro’s group in the Sierra. The Castros and Che Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever.”

Smith’s replacement — Phil Bonsal, a liberal career diplomat — fully backed and quickly adopted the official “carrot and even bigger carrot” policy towards Castro. The policy soon showered the new Cuban regime with $200 million in subsidies from U.S. taxpayers.

Castro was quick to respond:

“The U.S. is a vulture preying on humanity!” he raved just a week after Smith’s sacking. “Let the Marines invade! Then we’ll pile up 200,000 dead gringos!”

Last week’s 60 Minutes featured another in its long line of joint CBS-Castro productions. This time Anderson Cooper and his production crew partnered with the Stalinist regime’s Centro de Investigaciones Marinas for a propaganda piece on the marvels of Cuban coral reef conservation. The co-host of the CBS show and conduit for this fruitful Communist infomercial was Dr. David Guggenheim, senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation in Washington, D.C. who chairs its Cuba Marine Research and Conservation Program. Dr. Guggenheim toasts himself as a “Cubaphile” and toasts Castro’s fiefdom (which he has visited over 40 times in recent years) as a “magical place.”

Needless to remind (or perhaps not given that the Cold War supposedly ended over 20 years ago), such a gold-plated visa is not handed-out haphazardly by Stalinist regimes. And such a welcome mat and red carpet are not rolled out randomly. To wit:

“Cultural exchanges with foreign countries are our most effective propaganda,” reads a declassified KGB document from May, 20, 1981.

“We cannot for a second abandon propaganda,” wrote Fidel Castro in a letter to revolutionary colleague Melba Hernandez in 1954. “Propaganda is vital — propaganda is the heart of our struggle.”

“Foreign reporters, preferably American, were much more valuable to us than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda” wrote Che Guevara in his diaries.

It’s a long shot of speculation here, but just maybe the sentiments mentioned above had something to do with Cooper and Guggenheim’s instant Cuban visas and VIP pampering?

Dr. Guggenheim’s “magical place,” by the way, just decreed three days of mourning for Kim Jong Il. When Fidel Castro visited North Korea in 1986 his paeans to his hosts sounded much like Cooper and Guggenheim’s paeans to theirs last week. “I was astounded by the magnificent achievements of the heroic Korean people,” wrote Castro. “There wasn’t a single topic I could not discuss with my illustrious host [Kim Il Sung].”

Che Guevara’s worldwide diplomatic tour in 1960 included North Korea, which stole his heart. “North Korea is a model to which revolutionary Cuba should aspire,” he proclaimed upon returning to Havana. Then he promptly put his aspiration into action by setting up a huge prison camp at Guanahacabibes in western-most Cuba. This barbed wire enclosure cornered with machine gun towers and featuring forced-labor in the broiling sun supervised by Soviet bayonets was set up specifically — and instantly crammed to suffocation with — “lazy youths” and “delinquents.” But no “Occupy Guanahacabibes ” or “Occupy Havana” demonstrations have been recently reported, that I know of.

After surfacing from their scuba dive at Jardines de la Reina reef off southern Cuba, Cooper and Guggenheim rhapsodized for the CBS cameras thusly:

Guggenheim: “The corals are healthy. The fish are healthy and abundant. There are predators here, large sharks. It’s the way these ecosystems really should look.”

Anderson Cooper: “You’re saying this is like a time capsule, almost?”

Guggenheim: “It’s a living time machine. And it’s a really incredible opportunity to learn from.”

Cooper: “So something here holds the key to figuring out how to save other reefs and bring them back.”

Guggenheim: “it’s because this ecosystem is being protected, it’s got a leg up on other ecosystems around the world that are being heavily fished.”

“Of all the people I interviewed in New Orleans regarding the Kennedy assassination, Carlos Bringuier was the one I trusted most. I could see in his eyes he was always telling me the complete truth.” (Oriana Fallaci, L, Europeo, 1969.)

“That weasel walked into my store and started looking around,” recalls Carlos Bringuier about the afternoon of August 5, 1963. “But I could sense he wasn’t a shopper. Sure enough, after a few minutes of browsing he came up and extended his hand. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In 1963 the CIA regarded the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) “the most militant and deeply motivated of all the Cuban exile organizations seeking to oust Castro.” Carlos Bringuier was their representative in New Orleans. It was DRE agents who infiltrated Cuba and brought out the first reports of Soviet missile installations–to the scoffs of everyone from Camelot’s CIA to the State Department’s wizards, to the White House’s Best and Brightest. It took two months for anyone to finally take them seriously. A U-2 flight then confirmed every last detail of what the DRE boys had been risking their lives for months to report.

“Oswald approached me because my name was so often linked to anti-Castro activities in the local (New Orleans) news,” recalls Bringuier. “He even jammed his hand in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills, offering to contribute to the anti-Castro cause. I was suspicious and declined, but he kept blasting Castro and Communism in very colorful terms the whole time he was in the store. He returned the next day, snarled out a few more anti-Castroisms and dropped off his training manual for the anti-Castro fight, Guidebook for Marines.”

Two days later Bringuier was astounded to spot Oswald a few blocks away from his store distributing Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets. Carlos approached, accepted a pamphlet, ripped it to pieces and a scuffle ensued. The cops arrived, the scuffle made the news, and a few days later Bringuier and Oswald debated on New Orleans radio and TV.

Dozens of books, movies, articles and TV specials depict these events. What they don’t depict is how, between their scuffle and debate, Carlos and a friend Carlos Quiroga turned the tables on Oswald. Posing as a Castro-sympathizer eager to join Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Quiroga (who had not been in the store or involved in the scuffle) visited Oswald at his home and they commiserated for hours. “You read everyplace that Oswald was dumb, a flake, a patsy, a set-up,” says Bringuier. “Nonsense. He was a smooth operator and spoke fluent Russian.”

Quiroga noticed that Oswald’s living room was filled with Fair Play for Cuba Committee literature. From one stack Oswald pulled an application to join the Committee and offered it to Quiroga. Yet during the Warren Commission circus the Fair Play for Cuba Committee repeatedly denied that Oswald had any links with them.

Among the things that caught Quiroga’s eye during his visit was Oswald speaking Russian with his wife and daughter. “Its good practice,” explained Oswald. “I’m studying foreign languages at Tulane University.” He was lying. Also keep in mind the date:  this was 3 months before the assassination. Oswald’s stint in Russia was virtually unknown at the time.

On the very night of Nov. 22^rd 1963, Carlos Bringuier went public on American radio and TV: “We don’t know yet if Lee Harvey Oswald is President Kennedy’s assassin. But if he is, then Fidel Castro’s hand is involved in this assassination. ”

Fidel Castro immediately called a press conference to denounce Carlos Bringuier by name and kick off the media disinformation campaign that finally peaked as high comedy with Oliver Stone’s JFK.

“For 15 years of my life at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community, I was involved in a world-wide disinformation effort aimed at diverting attention away from the KGB’s involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald. The Kennedy assassination conspiracy was born—and it never died” (Ion Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc.)

But Carlos Bringuier was on to the disinformation campaign from its very birthday.

When Japan’s ferocious General Tomoyuki Yamashita (“The Tiger of Malaya”) finally emerged from his headquarters on Luzon to surrender on September 2^nd 1945 he handed his pistol, samurai sword and battle flag to the nearest U.S. soldier he saw. This was staff sergeant Manuel Perez-Garcia of the 32nd Infantry Division. Perez-Garcia was born in Cuba but immigrated to the U.S. after Pearl Harbor to join the U.S. Army and volunteer for combat.

At war’s end the 82nd Airborne presented a special trophy to the U.S. soldier who had racked up the most enemy kills in the Pacific theater. Today that trophy sits prominently in Miami’s Bay of Pigs Museum, donated by the man who won it, WWI and Bay of Pigs veteran Manuel Perez-Garcia (who started with the 82nd but fought in the Pacific with the 32^nd.). The trophy sits alongside Yamashita’s samurai sword and battle flag—and the three purple hearts, three bronze stars and three silver stars Mr. Perez-Garcia earned in the Pacific.

Upon the Communist invasion of South Korea in June of 1950, Manuel Perez-Garcia rallied to the U.S. colors again, volunteering for the U.S. army again at age 41. It took a gracious letter from President Harry Truman himself to explain that by U.S. law Manuel was slightly over-aged but mostly that, “You, sir, have served well above and beyond your duty to the nation. You’ve written a brilliant page in service to this country.” Mr. Perez-Garcia’s son, Jorge, however was the right age for battle in Korea and stepped to the fore. He joined the U.S. army, made sergeant and died from a hail of Communist bullets while leading his men in Korea on May 4th 1952.

When Perez Garcia was 51 years old the Quisling Castro brothers in partnership with Soviet proxy Che Guevara were rapidly converting his native country into a Soviet satrapy. So Manuel volunteered for combat again, in what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

At the time, Cuba’s enraged campesinos had risen in arms by the thousands as Castro and Che started stealing their land to build Soviet Kolkhozes, and murdering all who resisted. Alarmed by the savage insurgency, Castro and Che sent a special emissary named Flavio Bravo whimpering to their sugar-daddy Khruschev. “We are on a crusade against kulaks like you were in 1930,” whimpered this old–line Cuban Communist party member.

In short order, Soviet military “advisors,” still flush from their success against their own campesinos in the Ukrainian Holocaust, were rushed to Cuba.

This anti-Stalinist rebellion 90 miles from U.S. shores and involving ten times the number of rebels, ten times the casualties and lasting twice as long as the puerile skirmish against Batista, found no intrepid U.S. reporters anywhere near Cuba’s hills. What came to be known as The Bay of Pigs invasion was originally planned as a link-up with the Cuban resistance of the time, which was more numerous (per capita) than the French resistance before D-Day.

At the bloody beachhead now known as the Bay of Pigs, Manuel Perez-Garcia gave the Castroites a thrashing as bad as he’d given the Japanese. These Cuban freedom-fighters battled savagely against a Soviet-trained and led force 10 times theirs’ size, inflicting casualties of 20-to-1. “They fought magnificently—and they were NOT defeated!” stressed their trainer Marine Col. Jack Hawkins, a multi-decorated veteran of Bataan, Iwo Jima and Inchon. “They simply ran out of ammunition after being abandoned by their sponsor the U.S. Government.”

“Wimps!” sneers Michael Moore about Bay of Pigs veterans in his book “Downsize This.” “Ex-Cubans with a yellow stripe down their backs– and crybabies too!”

The Washington Post’s vendetta against Cuban-American Marco Rubio continues with another hit-piece last week and with MSM soul mates CNN and The Los Angeles Times chiming in. But the WaPo’s rancor against the most lopsidedly Republican voters in America didn’t start with the Rubio hit-piece last month.

To wit: Imagine the uproar from the mainstream media/Democratic axis upon discovering a Tea Party placard that celebrates the mass expulsion of Hispanic U.S. citizens from U.S. shores. (Heck, one that celebrated the expulsion of illegals would detonate their hair-trigger charge of “racism”). Well, back in August 2007 a mass expulsion of U.S. citizens of Hispanic heritage was in fact celebrated with a cartoon by The Washington Post. This hyper-sensitive guardian of liberal sensibilities, this vigilante, prosecutor, and judge for anything printed, spoken, or whispered that could conceivably imply a derogatory quality to any conceivable ethnic group ran this cartoon. Please study it carefully.

Note that a smiling Uncle Sam insults an American ethnic group (Cuban-Americans) as “nuisances” while forcibly expelling them from the nation in a rickety boat titled “Cuban-Americans,” while these scowling, elderly and Mafiosi-clad people scream “we demand a chance to interfere with the ’08 election!”

By “interfere” we have to assume the cartoonist refers to the right, privilege and duty bestowed upon U.S. citizens known as “voting.” It so happens that the cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, is himself an immigrant to this country. In an interview with Time magazine he admitted to “leaning Democratic” in his politics.

I now invite you to contemplate the reaction from the usual political-correctness police had any other U.S. ethnic group (except overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans) inhabited that boat. Imagine the fire and brimstone (literal, perhaps) if instead of Fedoras (rarely worn by Cuban-Americans, by the way) the group had worn keffiyehs, burqas and chadors.

Imagine the clamor and attempted extortion followed by craven apologies and groveling if the boat’s passengers had been “nappy-headed” and headed for Africa. Imagine the rallies in Los Angeles and the indignant blustering by California politicians, The Hispanic Congressional Caucus and Nancy Pelosi if they’d worn sombreros.

Such cartoons are indeed imaginable with other ethnic groups — but surely with Uncle Sam cast as the villain, wearing a white hood, a swastika or an Ann Coulter mask. Maybe all three. In this one Uncle Sam smiles benevolently while handing the boat’s ethnic occupants their just desserts.

When authorities in Virginia’s Prince William County attempted to enforce U.S. laws against illegal immigration a few years ago The Washington Post denounced it as “shameful,” “hypocritical” and “ugly.” “Hounding Immigrants” ran the editorial’s title. “By singling out illegal immigrants, local politicians are contributing to what is becoming a poisonous, increasingly nativist atmosphere that will infect relations with Hispanics generally.”

Forty nine years ago on Oct. 28^th JFK “solved” the Cuban Missile Crisis. Given the influence of Camelot’s court scribes and their cronies in the mainstream media, perhaps a refresher on conservative reaction to this “solution” is in order:

“We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” growled Barry Goldwater.

“Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” wrote Richard Nixon. “Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard.”

“We’ve been had!” yelled then Navy Chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK “solved” the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very “blockade” against Cuba.

“The biggest defeat in our nation’s history!” bellowed Air Force Chief Curtis Lemay, while whacking his fist on his desk.

“We missed the big boat,” said Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning the details of the deal with Khrushchev.

“It’s a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy,” wrote Alexander Haig. “The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy’s men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas.”

Even Democrats despaired. “This nation lacks leadership,” said Dean Acheson, the Democratic elder statesman whom Kennedy consulted on the matter. “The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy’s team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time.”

But not for the Soviets. “We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries:

– security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba (emphasis added).

Khrushchev seemed prepared to yank the missiles even before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What?” he gasped that week, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he [Fidel Castro] proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba?  But that is insane!…Remove them [Soviet missiles] as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” instructed the Soviet premier.

The Kennedy team’s brainstorming sessions were certainly no waste of time for the primary beneficiary. “Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said,” snickered Fidel Castro. “Perhaps one day they’ll be made public.”

“We can’t say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.” That’s what Robert F. Kennedy said to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis.

(All above quotes are fully documented in “Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant.”)

Castro’s regime’s was granted new status. Let’s call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Cuban freedom-fighters working from South Florida were suddenly rounded up for “violating U.S. Neutrality laws.” Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others “quarantined,” prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested, that not a hair on his chiny chin-chin was harmed by the hot-headed exiles. When some moved the bases of the liberation fight to the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, the adamantly “non-interventionist” Camelot liberals suggested (strongly) to these governments that the Cuban freedom-fighters be booted out.

JFK’s Missile crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba’s in-house freedom-fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different “bands of bandits” as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba’s countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.

“Gaddafi, you poor, stupid sap,” Castro must be snickering.

Last July one of America’s biggest TV networks craved to interview Senator Marco Rubio. Univision is the biggest Spanish-language network in the U.S., reaching thirteen and a half million households (95 percent of the “Hispanic” total), making it 4th biggest in the U.S., just ahead of NBC.  Mexican-Americans make up most of its viewers so the network’s editorial tone essentially echoes that of the Democrat-controlled Hispanic Congressional Caucus.

Univision’s owner is actually an Egyptian-born Israeli-American named Haim Saban, who ranks among the Democratic Party’s most lavish benefactors. “I don’t say this lightly,” said Democratic National Committee head Terry McAuliffe back in 2007, “Haim Saban saved the Democratic Party.”

This summer Senator Rubio was asked to appear on the network’s top show, Al Punto, for an interview with Univision’s star anchorman, Jorge Ramos, hailed as “the Brian Williams of Hispanic TV” by AdAge. Ramos is a multi-Emmy winner and author of a bestseller titled “Open Borders,” which pretty much sums up his position. Marco Rubio opposes even the Dream Act. So the plan called for “Hispanic” Univision tinkling the tune and “Hispanic” Senator Marco Rubio either stepping and fetching, tap dancing or being outed in front of the vast majority of America’s “Hispanic” households as anything “but a credit to his race,” more like a traitor. Herman Cain knows something about this.

And like Herman Cain, Senator Rubio declined the role of Mr. Bojangles. So Univision cranked up the inducements. They had the goods on Rubio, they explained in a meeting with his staff.  Marco’s brother-in-law had been busted for drugs in 1987 and they planned a prime-time expose of the scandal. Marco’s cooperation with an interview just might prompt Univision to “soften” or even kill the program altogether.

Marco was 16-years-old at the time and this was his brother-in-law. If this strikes you as hardly scandalous for the freshman senator, such is the desperation among the “Hispanic” (i.e. Democratic) establishment to damage Marco Rubio that offering to silence this item struck them as an offer he couldn’t refuse. Then the Democratic-Hispanic establishment would tuck Rubio in their pocket as surely as the Corleones tucked Nevada Senator Geary in theirs.

When Marco’s sister refused Univision’s offer to  “contribute” to their report, the network parked a huge news truck from of her house to further harass her and apparently also to demonstrate their investigative prowess. “I always knew Univision to be a professional organization until this happened,” said Rubio of the blackmail attempt.

The “expose” on Rubio’s brother-in-law ran for two days last July and instantly fizzled, despite a publicity blizzard by Univision to their MSM soulmates. Apparently the tangent proved too embarrassingly tenuous even for most Rubio-bashers. Univision’s sleaze factor also nixed their planned Republican debate this January. “Even in this time of ever-changing media techniques, Univision’s unethical tactics stand out,” wrote Rick Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan to Univision’s CEO. “Therefore, Gov. Perry will not consider participating in the Jan. 29, 2012, Univision debate until your network addresses this ethical breach and takes action to correct it.” All candidates except Ron Paul are in lockstep with Gov. Perry on this issue.

Last week came time for “Target Rubio Plan B.”  A front-page story in the Washington Post by Manuel Franzi-Roig (a frequent visitor to Castro’s Cuba, which he gushes over as “intriguing and extraordinarily exotic”) accused Rubio of “embellishing” his family history.

The WaPo’s Rubio-gate boils down to this:  Documents they “uncovered” (in fact they’ve been prominently displayed on a Birther blog since May) reveal that Rubio’s parents came to the U.S. in 1956 rather than in 1959 as he has claimed in some interviews and on his Senate website.  Castro took over Cuba in January of 1959. So because his parents weren’t fleeing Castro’s rule at the instant of arrival in the U.S. Marco “embellished” his family’s Cinderella story. He’s technically not the son of glamorous “political exiles,” as his Senate bio claims, but of tacky “economic immigrants” — legal ones to boot, making them super-tacky in WaPo eyes.

Harry Belafonte recently denounced Herman Cain as a “bad apple,” a “false Negro” and as someone who was “denied intelligence” and “denied a view of history” (whatever that means). Belafonte said these things on the Joy Behar show, as the host, Behar, snickered her approval of Belafonte’s every vocalization, often before they were decipherable.

“If you believe in justice,” said Belafonte in an interview with Cuba’s propaganda ministry years earlier, “if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people’s rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humankind—then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!”

If only Herman Cain were a lily-white Stalinist whose regime murdered more people in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six, jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate (per capita) than Stalin’s — including the longest suffering black political prisoners in modern history. If only Herman Cain proposed policies to plunge a nation more prosperous than half of Europe into one that repels Haitians. If only he’d driven into exile—even with machine-gunners and Tiger Sharks as dutiful border guards—20 per cent of the population from a nation formerly flooded with immigrants.

Instead Herman Cain spent most of his life creating wealth and promoting freedom. He personifies the antithesis to the disaster and horror known as Castroism. This grates on Harry Belafonte.

Consider this view of history that Belafonte was denied: “The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and drink, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” wrote Occupy Wall Street hero Che Guevara in his diaries. Shortly after entering Havana, Che took a break from signing death warrants and blasting apart the skulls of defenseless men and boys, exhaled, wiped his brow and gave a radio conference.  A black listener asked him what the revolution planned to do for Cuba’s blacks. “We’re going to do for Cuba’s blacks exactly what they did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean nothing!”

Nonetheless, “Viva Che!—Viva Fidel!” roared Harry Belfonte’s friend Jesse Jackson, arm in arm with Castro at the University of Havana in 1994.

Actually, Che was much too modest. “Nothing” is not an accurate description of Castroite treatment of Cuba’s blacks.  Fidel and Raul Castro are sons of a European imperial soldier (Angel Castro), who butchered Cuban patriots for pay on behalf of the King of Spain. Then came the sons’ turn. First off, by media manipulation, terrorism and guile (Not guerrilla war) they overthrew a Cuban government where Cuban blacks had served as president of the senate, minister of agriculture, chief of army, and head of state (Fulgencio Batista was a grandson of slaves and was born in a palm-roofed shack in the Cuban countryside). These blacks had all served elective and appointed office in a nation 72% white, by the way.

Not that you’ll learn any of this from the liberals’ exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the Godfather II movie, which is probably still an improvement over what the Ivy League teaches. Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90% black, while only 9% of the ruling Stalinist party is black. Many of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents today are black, many female. Were they opposing anyone but the Left’s favorite poster boys, the mainstream media would have made them household names long ago. Think Rigoberta Menchu and Winnie Mandela.

Guevara would clear the occupation of Wall Street in a New York nanosecond. His colleagues of the time recall Che cheering the Soviet tanks slaughtering Hungarian freedom-fighters in the streets of Budapest. The youths they machine-gunned and blasted were all “fascists and CIA agents!” he raved.

“I’m a Stalinist,” Che Guevara boasted to Cuban colleague Carlos Franqui in 1957. That sniveling speech by Khrushchev denouncing Stalin’s crimes was nothing but “imperialist lies.”  But Khrushchev’s subsequent spunk in sending tanks and battle-hardened Siberian troops to massacre Hungarian protesters, Che later conceded, certainly helped ameliorate his speech’s doctrinal errors.

Forty-four years ago this week, Ernesto “Che” Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. If the saying “What goes around comes around” ever fit, it’s here.

Two years ago, the U.K. Guardian interviewed Oscar-winning actor Benicio del Toro regarding his Cannes-winning role as Che Guevara in Stephen Soderbergh’s movie Che. “Dammit This Guy Is Cool!” was the interview title. “I hear of this guy, and he’s got a cool name, Che Guevara!” says del Toro. “Groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics! So I came across a picture of Che, smiling, in fatigues, and I thought, ‘Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!’”

There you have it. In effect, Benicio del Toro probably revealed the inspiration (and daunting intellectual exertion) of millions of Che fans, including hundreds currently “occupying” Wall Street.

As a celebrity-hipster fan of Che Guevara, del Toro has plenty of company. Johnny Depp often wears a Che pendant and in a Vibe Magazine interview proclaimed his “digging” Che Guevara. In fact, had del Toro or Depp been born earlier and in Cuba and attempted a rebel lifestyle, their “digging” of Castroite Cuba would have been of a more literal nature. They’d have found themselves chained and digging ditches and mass graves in a prison camp system inspired by the man they “dig.” Had their digging lagged, a “groovy” Communist guard might have shattered their teeth with a “groovy” Czech machine-gun butt, or perhaps slashed their buttocks with some “groovy” Soviet bayonets.

In a famous speech in 1961, Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates,” commanded Guevara. “Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.”

Among the first, the most militant, and the most widespread opposition groups to the Stalinism Ernesto “Che”  Guevara (who often cheekily signed his named as “Stalin II”) imposed on Cuba came from Cuban labor organizations.

And who can blame them? Here’s a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class,” it starts.

“Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by Social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S.”

In half a heartbeat, the Obama team could put the kibosh on the most dangerous offshore oil drilling ever proposed near U.S. shores, scheduled to begin in December by a Spanish/Cuban corporation. By fighting this drilling, his “environmentalist” allies could get the biggest bang for their lobbying buck in their history.

But all bets are off. This drilling, you see, won’t be by tacky/villainous U.S. oil companies. Instead, a Spanish (cool/hip socialist European country)-Cuban (cool/hip land of beatniks Fidel Castro and Che Guevara) oil company  will be the outfit drilling in Cuban waters 60 miles from Key West. U.S. companies are banned from exploring anywhere within 125 miles off the Florida Coast, by the way.

But none of the usual histrionics and fist-shaking from the usual “environmentalist” quarters against “rapists of Mother Earth,” “despoilers of our coasts and oceans,” and “obscene profiteers!” have manifested against Castro’s business partners. None whatsoever. Instead, as a contingency against any drilling mishaps, the above parties have already found a way to blame — you guessed it — Republicans. More specifically, the most lop-sidedly Republican voters in U.S. history: Americans of Cuban heritage, who supposedly single-handedly maintain the so-called embargo against Cuba and thus prevent any co-operation with Cuba in case of a spill.

“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot by not working together,” groused the Environmental Defense Fund’s Bill Whittle after returning from a recent meeting with members of Cuba’s Stalinist nomenklatura. “They’re taking the lessons of the BP spill very seriously. They could have easily distanced themselves from what happened and said theirs is a different situation from BP, and said ‘thanks very much.’ The very opposite happened.”

Aw, why, those fine folks down in Cuba just couldn’t have been more kind, helpful and accommodating. Now us blockheaded Yankee bullies? Hopeless!

You see, a team headed by the chairman of Obama’s BP Spill Task Force, William Reilly, and including Dan Whittle, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, just visited Cuba to assist them with their drilling plans. Now, when the Bush administration planned to open areas off Florida to U.S. oil companies, this same Environmental Defense Fund went ballistic:

“Offshore drilling poses an unacceptable level of risk to two of Florida’s most important economic sectors,” They thundered. “Opening a new 1.5 million acre swath of the Eastern Gulf to oil drilling unnecessarily threatens marine life with pollution and puts Florida beaches at a much greater risk for spills. Given the environmental risks….this seems like an ill-considered move by the Bush administration. Opening more of the Gulf to drilling now makes little environmental, economic or political sense.”

The drilling rig on its way to a site 60 miles from Florida’s coast is Chinese-built, Italian–owned and Spanish-leased. Its purpose is to enrich Cuba’s Stalinist nomenklatura, enabling them to better sponsor terrorism and torture people. If only the Obama-environmental alliance team could muster the same contempt for this alliance as they do for tacky Texans.

“I am leaving Cuba most disappointed and perplexed,” said former New Mexico Governor and recent Democratic diplomatic troubleshooter Bill Richardson from Havana’s Hotel Nacional last week. “After one week [in Cuba] I have exhausted all possibilities to visit Alan Gross. I have tried all channels. All I asked was a simple humanitarian gesture. And it was denied.”

Alan Gross is a U.S. citizens and a contractor for USAID, jailed in Cuba since December 3, 2009. His crime was bringing cell phone and Internet equipment into Castro’s fiefdom to help Cuba’s tiny Jewish community communicate more freely with the outside world. For the record, pre-Castro Cuba boasted more phones and TVs per capita than most European countries. Today, Castro’s fiefdom has fewer Internet users per capita than Uganda, and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.

According to the Associated Press (emphasis added): “The case has crippled attempts to improve relations between Washington and Havana, and destroyed what had been a warm relationship between Richardson and Cuban leaders.”

The blame for this “crippling” is being disputed. Castro regime spokesperson Josefina Vidal was quoted by the AP as follows (emphasis added): “The release of U.S. citizen jailed in Cuba, Alan Gross, was never on the table during the preparations for his trip, which was made clear to Mr. Richardson as soon as he raised it.”

“The Cubans are making flimsy excuses,” replies Richardson’s spokesman, Gilbert Gallegos, “only after they personally invited Gov. Richardson to discuss the Alan Gross detention and only after they inexplicably stonewalled Governor Richardson.”

Last Tuesday, President Obama told reporters: “Anything to get Mr. Gross free we will support, although Mr. Richardson does not represent the U.S. government in his actions there.” Then the New York Times reported that, in fact, Richardson would offer to remove Cuba from the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. U.S. “tourists” do not generally carry such authority.

In fact, there’s little incentive for the Castro regime to comply with the Obama administration, which has been offering carrots aplenty, but without sticks. To wit: In executive order after executive order, Obama abolished President Bush’s travel and remittance restrictions to Castro’s terrorist-sponsoring fiefdom and opened the travel and remittance cash pipeline to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba today is estimated at $4 billion a year. While a proud Soviet satrapy, Cuba received $3-5 billion annually from the Soviets. But the Soviet subsidies came with strings attached. Nowadays, the cash-flow from the U.S. is essentially “free-money” for the Castro regime. So again: “What’s to improve?” the Castroites must be asking themselves.

As a public service for Gov. Richardson and the Obama State Department’s Cuba “experts,” I provide case studies of others who helped Castro consolidate power, then promptly exhausted their “usefulness.” Few revolutions have “devoured their own children” with the voracity of Castro and Che’s.