A union protestor in Madison Wisconsin was caught on camera saying he wants to vote for Fidel Castro and clone Che Guevara.
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine (who calls Che Guevara as his honorary “fifth band member”) was in Madison last week denouncing Gov. Scott Walker as “the Mubarak of the Midwest.”
The union members cursed by fate to live under the regime co-founded by Che Guevara might like a word with these protesters. 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. Thousands of these took up arms against Che Guevara. The MRP (Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo) was among these Cuban resistance groups of mostly laborers. But don’t take it from me. 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, utopian social reforms.”
Cuba’s enraged campesinos also rose in arms by the thousands when Castro and Che started stealing their land to build Soviet Kolkhozes. Alarmed by the insurgency, Castro and Che sent a special emissary named Flavio Bravo to Khruschev. “We are on a crusade against kulaks like you were in 1930,” pleaded this old –line Cuban Communist party member.
In short order, Soviet agricultural and military “advisors,” still flush from their success against their own campesinos in the Ukrainian Holocaust were rushed to Cuba.
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.
Che had a very bloody (and typically cowardly) hand in this slaughter, one of the major _anti-_insurgency wars on this continent. Eighty percent of these anti-communist guerrillas were executed on the spot upon capture, a Che specialty. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” is how one of the lucky few who escaped described this desperate freedom fight against the Soviet occupation of Cuba through their proxies Fidel and Che.
In 1956 when Che linked up with Fidel, Raul, and their Cuban chums in Mexico city, one of them (now in exile) recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as “Fascists!” and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks.
In 1962 Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines. “Cuban militia units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Cuban countryside, “reads a report from the USIA of the time. “The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counterrevolutionaries and bandits.” At one point in 1962, one of every 18 Cubans was a political prisoner. Fidel himself admits that they faced 179 bands of”counter-revolutionaries” and “bandits.”
Mass murder was the order in Cuba’s countryside. It was the only way to decimate so many rebels, mostly farmers and laborers. In a relocation and concentration campaign that shamed anything the Brits did to the Boers, the Castroites, under Soviet tutelage, ripped hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their ancestral homes and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of the island Cuba.
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.”
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