The Democratic Party recently announced that it was launching a Florida-centric online ad campaign to promote President Joe Biden’s criticism of the Cuban regime amid street protests on the island pushing for reforms to the nation’s communist government.
Biden, long after Republicans embraced and promoted the protesters, called communism a “failed system.” The ads will reflect that.
Better late than never. Democrats found themselves boxed in on Cuba because their staunchest allies, Black Lives Matter activists, stood behind the regime, and because most of their party, including on Capitol Hill, explicitly or tacitly supports the regime’s economic agenda.
But while Democrats hem and haw, the late Cuban strongman Fidel Castro’s legacy is being scrubbed from at least one part of the left-wing domain: a college campus.
In this case, Penn State University.
The conservative group Campus Reform reports that Penn State administrators have agreed to take down a quote by Castro from its Paul Robeson Cultural Center.
Robeson, by the way, was an actor, a singer, and an unabashed apologist for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. He once claimed that Soviet dissidents opposed to Stalin ought to be shot.
According to Campus Reform, the quote from Castro says, “The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing — that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world — is what I wish for all.”
But students began to demand that it be removed earlier this month as the protests in Cuba gained momentum.
The leader of the Penn State push, Erik Suarez, is from Venezuela. On social media, he criticized the “repression” being forced on the protesters.
The quote, he said, according to Campus Reform, “represents all the pain, suffering, and misery that my country [Venezuela] is going through. And to see this on a campus building and cultural center is deeply painful, especially because of my love for Penn State.”
Suarez asked university President Eric Barron to get rid of it. One day after Campus Reform picked up on the controversy, Suarez got an email from Frank Guadagnino, Penn State’s vice president for administration.
“The University agrees with the concerns you and others have expressed and the quote is being removed,” it said.
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