Whew! Good thing he wasn’t a Tea-partier caught on camera saying he wants to vote for Benito Mussolini and clone Augusto Pinochet!
Instead he was a union protestor in Madison Wisconsin caught on camera saying he wants to vote for Fidel Castro and clone Che Guevara.
Whew! Good thing he wasn’t Ted Nugent calling Joe Mc Carthy his rock-roll “bandmate!”
Instead it was Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine (who honors Che Guevara as his “fifth band member”) in Madison denouncing Gov. Scott Walker as “the Mubarak of the Midwest!”
So naturally there’s no kerfuffle from the MSM or Democratic Party. As I recall the (utterly bogus as it turned out) use of the “N” word by Tea-partiers back in March created quite a kerfuffle.
A much larger, violent and protracted kerfuffle erupted in Cuba by the union members cursed by fate to live under the gentlemen hailed by some high-profile Madison protestors. 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 Che Guevara and Fidel Castro 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 1958, Cuba had a higher per capita income than Austria or Japan and Cuban industrial workers earned 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.
Then in a TV speech on June 26, 1961, when Che Guevara was Cuba's "Minister of Industries," he proclaimed: "The Cuban workers have to adjust to a collectivist social order--and by no means can they go on strike!"
And why should they? After all, at Soviet gunpoint, all of Cuba’s unions had become departments of the Stalinist regime, hence owned “by the people”—hence “public.”
This "no strike" provision was unacceptable to Cuban laborers -- many of whom took up arms in protest, along with Cuba’s enraged campesinos who rose in arms by the thousands when Castro and Che started stealing their land to build Soviet Kolkhozes. Soviet agricultural "advisors," still flush from their success against their own campesinos in the Ukrainian Holocaust, were among the top advisors of Cuba’s then “Minister of Industries” (Che Guevara.)
This anti-Stalinist rebellion, involving ten times the number of rebels, ten times the number of casualties, and lasting twice as long as the puerile skirmish against Batista, found no reporter anywhere near Cuba's hills. The Cuban farmers and laborers’ desperate, bloody and lonely rebellion against their enslavement spread to the towns and cities and lasted from late 1959 to 1966. Castro himself admitted that his troops, militia and Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as they labeled these freedom-fighting rednecks and working men. Tens of thousands of troops, scores of Soviet advisors, and squadrons of Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers finally extinguished the lonely Cuban freedom-fight. Elsewhere they call this "an insurgency," and reporters flock in to “embed” and report.
In 1962 the Kennedy-Khrushchev swindle that "solved" the Missile Crisis — not only starved these Cuban freedom-fighters of the measly aid they'd been getting from Cuban-exile freebooters (who were rounded up for violating U.S. neutrality laws) — it also sanctioned the 44,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. Elsewhere they call this "foreign occupation," and liberals wail in anguish.
This ferocious guerrilla war, waged 90 miles from America's shores, might have taken place on the planet Pluto for all you'll read about it in the MSM and all you'll learn about it from The History Channel or NPR. To get an idea of the odds faced by those rural rebels and laborers, the desperation of their battle and the damage they wrought, you might revisit Tony Montana during the last 15 minutes of "Scarface."