Free Republic

When your an...

Proving that communism has worked no better for students at a University of California-San Diego cooperative living space than it did for the billions of citizens of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the aptly-named “Che Cafe” is quickly running out of cash. In the cleverly titled article, “In the Red,” The UCSD Guardian noted that the Che Cafe–a student-run co-op named after mass-murdering dictator Che Guevara and governed by the communist philosophy–has become a “money pit consistently plagued with safety issues.”

At a ceremony in Havana last week, UNESCO (U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) honored Che Guevara by enshrining his writings in its hallowed “Memory of the World Register.” The ceremony included several members of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s family. “UNESCO’s work is part of our support for freedom of expression as an inalienable human right set down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” declares the UN’s mission statement. But not far from where this UNESCO/Guevara ceremony took place Cubans were being starved and beaten in pestiferous torture chambers for the crime of quoting the UN Declaration...

A reader points out that President Barack Obama's new typeface is Revolution Gothic, a style inspired by retro Cuban propaganda posters. Who vets the fonts? (Obama press secretary Ben LaBolt emails: “Your GOP operative should have had the courtesy to stay sober before noon, and BuzzFeed should go back to labeling cat slideshows.”)

Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has picked up the endorsement and fundraising support of entertainer Harry Belafonte, whose reputation as a calypso singer has been superseded by his service to international Marxism. During the Cold War, Belafonte sang at a “Concert for Peace” in communist East Germany, where he attacked President Reagan’s anti-communist foreign policy. A long-time supporter of the Castro dictatorship, he has more recently been singing the praises of Venezuelan Marxist ruler Hugo Chavez. The April 19 Warren fundraiser, which included Belafonte’s name on the letterhead, was held at the Manhattan penthouse of HBO executive Michael...

Latin America: Nothing exposes the myth of Cuba's vaunted health care system quite like the news that ailing dictator Fidel Castro refuses to use it. Instead, he prefers care from Spain. What hypocrisy. Over the weekend, Cuba flew in Dr. Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, chief of the gastrointestinal care unit at Madrid's Gregorio Maranon Hospital, to look over the aging dictator and see if there was anything he could do. Spanish medics also brought in new capitalist-world medical equipment, part of a series of such shipments the Cuban government has been quietly provisioning for Castro since June, well before he...

Ernesto 'Che' Guevara: 39 Years of Hype by Humberto Fontova Posted Oct 06, 2006 Thirty-nine 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. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying, "What goes around comes around," ever fit, it's here. The number of men Che's "revolutionary tribunals" condemned to death in the identical manner range anywhere from 400 to 1,892. The number of defenseless men (and boys) Che personally murdered with his own pistol runs to the...

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too. He prepares his...

We live, as the pundits say, in the United States of Amnesia. Even so, did the makers of "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," an inquiry into our government's bizarre attempt to neutralize the perceived political juice of that famed English singer-songwriter, really need to spend half the movie explaining the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement to viewers? If things are really that bad, then perhaps the filmmakers should explain who John Lennon is. After all, the Beatles date back over 40 years. For those who do remember or are aware of the zeitgeist of the counterculture, this lengthy regurgitation...

Explaining the monumental failure of the Soviet system and empire, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a former official Soviet military historian, stressed that "the roots of the catastrophe lay in the ideology itself, in Leninism." All told, the "catastrophe" of attempting to impose a Marxist-Leninist utopia in the Soviet Union resulted in the deaths of as many as 25 million people, according to recently released and hitherto inaccessible Soviet archives -- a death toll that was the direct consequence of centrally planned massacres, mass deportations, labor camps, torture and famine. ... Within months of his rise to power, Lenin provided the definition...