I have gotten used to the usual useful idiots from Hollywood trotting down to Venezuela and chumming around with Hugo Chavez and telling everyone what a great guy he is. What I really wasn’t expecting was a group of Congress critters to go to Cuba and come out with praises for Fidel Castro.

Don’t get me wrong. I know they love the guy. But rarely do they so blatantly display it:

“The fifty-year embargo just hasn’t worked,” CBC Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-Ca.) told reporters this evening at a Capitol press conference after returning from a congressional delegation visit to Cuba. “The bottom line is that we believe its time to open dialogue with Cuba.”

Lee and others heaped praise on Castro, calling him warm and receptive during their discussion. But the lawmakers disputed Castro’s later statement that members of the congressional delegation said American society is still racist.

“It was quite a moment to behold,” Lee said, recalling her moments with Castro.

“It was almost like listening to an old friend,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Il.), adding that he found Castro’s home to be modest and Castro’s wife to be particularly hospitable.

“In my household I told Castro he is known as the ultimate survivor,” Rush said.

Unreal. For those who don’t know, Fidel Castro is a brutal communist dictator. He’s not a rockstar or a righteous dude. He’s a killer.

Here’s a little bit of Cuban history under Castro:

Castro tried to get Nikita Khrushchev to nuke several southern cities in the US in the early 1960’s, including New Orleans and probably Baton Rouge.

He incarcerates more people as a percentage of population than Hitler or Stalin did.

He murdered 17,000 Cubans and (several dozen U.S. citizens) with firing squads and dumped their bullet-riddled bodies in mass graves.

He has impoverished and brutalized Cuba to the point where 20 percent of its population risked their lives to flee. And prior to his glorious reign, Cuba took in more immigrants per capita than any country in the Western Hemisphere . More Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. , and Cuba even had to turn away European immigrants.

Castro sent his agents to torture to death American POWs in North Vietnam ’s Cu Loc POW camp outside Hanoi in 1967.

And since this was the Congressional Black caucus that is praising Castro, let’s have a look at the racism issue as it relates to the communist paradise:

According to anthropologists dispatched by the European Union, racism is systemic and institutional.[2] Blacks are systematically excluded from positions that tourism related jobs, where they could earn tips in hard currencies.[2] According to the EU study, blacks are relegated to poor housing, complained of the longest waits for healthcare, were excluded from managerial positions, received the lowest remittances from relatives abroad, and were five times more likely to be imprisoned.”[2]

Enrique Patterson describes race as “social bomb” and says that “If the Cuban government were to permit black Cubans to organize and raise their problems before [authorities] . . . totalitarianism would fall”.[5] Esteban Morales Domínguez, a professor in the University of Havana, says that “The absence of the debate on the racial problem already threatens . . . the revolution’s social project”.[5] Carlos Moore, who has authored extensive on the issue, says that “There is an unstated threat, blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead”.[5] He says that a new generation of black Cubans are looking at politics in another way.[5] Barack Obama’s victory has raised disturbing questions about the institutional racism in Cuba.[2] The Economist noted “The danger starts with his example: after all, a young, black, progressive politician has no chance of reaching the highest office in Cuba, although a majority of the island’s people are black.”[6]

Jorge Luis García Pérez, who was imprisoned and tortured for 17 years, states “The authorities in my country have never tolerated that a black person oppose the regime. During the trial, the color of my skin aggravated the situation. Later when I was mistreated in prison by guards, they always referred to me as being black”.[7]

These free, liberal African Americans are praising a man who also presided over the rounding up of homosexuals into concentration camps. Not my characterization, but the New York Times’s:

In Cuba, thousands of homosexuals were sent to concentration camps in the late 1960’s, together with others deemed deviant by the Castro regime. Echoing the slogan on the gates of Auschwitz, the camps were emblazoned with the words “Work will make you men.” Though the camps were shut after a few years, the subsequent purges of homosexuals from the ruling Communist Party were condemned by intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Susan Sontag.

In 1980, when angry mobs at officially organized rallies denounced gay men and women as “scum,” many homosexuals were among the 125,000 Cubans who fled in the Mariel boatlift. Cuba is the only country in the world to have quarantined homosexuals and others who test positive for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

It is impossible for me to see these Congressmen and women who praise Castro as anything other than morons. These are the same people who vilified Bush for waterboarding, but they praise Castro.

Behold the modern Democrat.

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• Fidel Resigns
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