This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.
by Roger Stone
August 18, 2026
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) marked the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth by attempting to resurrect one of the bloodiest dictators of the twentieth century as a champion of humanity.
In an official statement, the DSA praised Castro as an “organizer, a fighter” and a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle”. It accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio of committing “genocide” against the Cuban people, demanded his prosecution for “crimes against humanity”, and blamed the United States for the devastation created by nearly seven decades of communist dictatorship.
This was not an impetuous social media post from an errant intern. It was a considered declaration of allegiance to the totalitarian regime Castro built and his successors still operate.
Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!
Stone’s Rule applies here: when the left invokes genocide, examine whose firing squads actually operated at dawn.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926 near Birán in eastern Cuba, the son of a prosperous landowner. Educated by Jesuits, he studied law at the University of Havana, entered violent revolutionary politics, and developed the instincts of a demagogue. The mythology surrounding Castro depicts him as a humble peasant champion. In reality, he came from privilege and exploited legitimate grievances in pursuit of absolute power.
Castro also experienced American freedom firsthand. In 1948, he married Mirta Díaz Balart and spent an extended honeymoon in New York and Miami. The young revolutionary enjoyed American hotels, restaurants, automobiles, and consumer abundance, reportedly purchasing a Lincoln equipped with the modern luxuries of the day. He later returned to solicit money and political support among Cuban exiles.
After seizing power in 1959, Castro visited America on a public relations tour, presenting himself as a democratic reformer who was supposedly neither a communist nor an enemy of the United States. Vice President Richard Nixon met with him and perceived both Castro’s formidable political talent and the danger beneath his protestations.
Castro had seen private property, open commerce, political pluralism, and individual liberty at close range. He understood that a free people could criticize its government, build independent institutions, remove its leaders, and refuse obedience. Those were precisely the reasons he rejected the American model. Liberty places limits on rulers, and Fidel Castro had no interest in limits.
Castro took power after Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba in January 1959. He promised constitutional government, political freedom, and elections. Once secure, he postponed and then abandoned elections. Independent newspapers were silenced. Private property was confiscated. Political parties were eliminated. Labor unions became appendages of the state. Churches were harassed, religious education was restricted, and faithful Catholics were treated as politically suspect. Cuba became a one-party Marxist state aligned with the Soviet Union.
The prisons filled while the firing squads began their work. Revolutionary tribunals dispensed verdicts with the efficiency of an abattoir. Some defendants had committed crimes under Batista, but Castro’s machinery quickly expanded beyond proven wrongdoers. Former revolutionaries who opposed communist rule, journalists, businessmen, farmers, clergy, students, labor organizers, and ordinary citizens accused of disloyalty were imprisoned, terrorized, or driven into exile.
Cuba Archive has documented thousands of deaths and disappearances attributed to the regime, including executions, extrajudicial killings, prison deaths, and people killed while attempting to escape. The precise total remains disputed because communist dictatorships do not preserve transparent records of their crimes. Secrecy is part of the murder weapon.
What cannot be disputed is the existence of thousands of documented victims and an immense exile population whose families experienced the repression directly. Castro’s admirers quibble over numbers as if revising the inventory of a graveyard absolves the men who filled it. Human Rights Watch described Castro’s system as one that punished virtually every form of dissent. Amnesty International documented the ruthless suppression of expression, assembly, association, and movement. Critics faced arbitrary arrest, beatings, isolation, sham proceedings, dismissal from employment, denial of educational opportunities, and retaliation against relatives.
The state did not merely demand obedience in public. It insinuated itself into homes, friendships, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution placed surveillance at the block level. Neighbors observed neighbors, recorded visitors, reported gatherings, and identified anyone displaying insufficient revolutionary ardor.
Cubans learned that an innocent celebration could invite scrutiny if too many people arrived, curtains were closed, or someone suspected an unauthorized meeting. Imagine fearing a local party functionary because you closed the curtains during a five-year-old child’s birthday party. That is not solidarity, equality, or liberation. It is totalitarianism in its most intimate and suffocating form.
Castro’s Cuba became a tropical panopticon. The palm trees remained, the music survived, and the Cuban people retained their irrepressible spirit, but behind the picturesque facade stood informants, political police, ration books, prison cells, and permission slips. The state could determine where someone worked, whether a child received an education, whether a family obtained housing, and whether a citizen could leave the country. Fear became an invisible public utility, distributed more reliably than electricity or water.
The consequences are visible across Cuba today. Many residents endure power outages lasting most of the day. Food spoils because refrigerators cannot run. Water pumps fail, leaving neighborhoods without dependable service. Hospitals suffer blackouts and shortages of medicine, equipment, and basic supplies. Public transportation has been crippled by fuel scarcity. Farmers struggle to operate machinery or move crops. Food production declines while prices exceed the means of ordinary workers and pensioners.
Sanitation has deteriorated into a public health menace. Havana has endured enormous accumulations of uncollected garbage because collection trucks are broken or lack fuel. These are simply not priorities for the regime. Rotting waste attracts flies, mosquitoes, and rats. Stagnant water encourages disease. Residents burn rubbish because no functioning system removes it. Pharmacies lack ordinary medications. Schools lose instructional time. Elderly Cubans survive on meager pensions and help from relatives abroad. Parents spend hours searching for milk, eggs, cooking oil, and meat while Communist Party officials enjoy privileges unavailable, if not unimaginable, to the people they lecture about sacrifice.
American sanctions and recent pressure on Cuba’s fuel supplies have intensified immediate shortages. The DSA exploits that fact to erase the preceding 67 years of confiscation, command economics, corruption, decrepit infrastructure, suppression of private enterprise, and dependence on foreign patrons.
The Soviet Union subsidized Havana for decades. Venezuela later supplied discounted oil. Each patron temporarily concealed the same congenital defect. Castro built an economy incapable of sustaining itself because political control mattered more than production.
Communism consumes accumulated wealth the way locusts consume a field. First, the revolution distributes property it did not create. Then it exhausts inventories, drives away expertise, punishes initiative, and blames saboteurs for the resulting scarcity. When shelves empty and the electrical grid collapses, the party demands another sacrifice. Socialism promises abundance through confiscation and delivers equality by making everyone outside the ruling caste equally poor.
The Cuban people have paid in hunger, darkness, separation, and exile. The Camarioca exodus, the Freedom Flights, the Mariel boatlift, the balsero crisis, and the enormous recent migration were not vacations from a socialist paradise. Cubans boarded overloaded vessels and improvised rafts because remaining under communism had become intolerable. Many arrived in Florida carrying little beyond photographs, memories, and the knowledge that everything their families built had been stolen.
The DSA regards these exiles as inconvenient witnesses. Their testimony punctures the gauzy mythology taught in radical seminars. Cuban Americans know that Castro did not merely nationalize corporations. He confiscated neighborhood shops, family farms, homes, savings, and futures. They understand that “free” medicine means nothing when medicine cannot be found, and that literacy is not liberation when the government dictates what may be read, published, or believed. A prison can contain schools and clinics and remain a prison.
The DSA’s attack on Marco Rubio is especially repellent. Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants and has spent his career warning Americans about the ideology his family escaped. To brand him the architect of genocide while celebrating Fidel Castro is moral inversion of the most grotesque kind. It is comparable to prosecuting the fireman while presenting the arsonist with a humanitarian award. The DSA absolves the jailer, condemns the jailer’s opponent, and demands that Americans finance the prison.
This statement also destroys the organization’s favorite semantic evasion. DSA activists routinely insist that their “democratic socialism” bears no relationship to communist dictatorship. Yet when given the opportunity to commemorate Castro, they did not lament his political prisons, renounce his firing squads, or express solidarity with Cuban dissidents. They praised him and adopted the propaganda vocabulary of his regime. Their “democratic” modifier collapses the moment an actual Marxist dictator enters the room.
The DSA’s evil resides not merely in mistaken economic theories but in its willingness to excuse coercion whenever it advances the preferred ideological project. It romanticizes governments that abolish opposition, censor journalists, imprison dissenters, and impoverish workers while claiming to represent democracy and labor. Its rhetoric may be mellifluous, but its political lineage is sanguinary. The rose in its emblem cannot conceal the barbed wire growing beneath it.
History supplies ample warning. Lenin promised power to workers and created the Cheka. Stalin collectivized agriculture and produced famine, purges, deportations, and the Gulag. Mao promised a Great Leap Forward and presided over mass starvation. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge pursued ideological purity until killing fields replaced civil society. North Korea constructed a hereditary prison state. Venezuela, once among the wealthiest countries in Latin America, descended into scarcity, repression, and mass emigration under socialist rule. Different flags, languages, and climates produced the same lugubrious procession of censorship, rationing, corruption, terror, and graves.
President Donald J. Trump understands this pattern and refuses to indulge the euphemisms surrounding it. He has declared that “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty” and described it as an enemy of free people, the Constitution, and the principles of July 4, 1776. He established Anti Communism Week in November of 2025 to remember more than 100 million victims of communist regimes and reaffirmed that America will never surrender its freedom to this pernicious ideology.
President Trump recognizes that communism advances when decent people dismiss it as antiquated, fashionable, or harmless. It seldom arrives by announcing the abolition of freedom. It advances through confiscatory promises, resentment, institutional infiltration, historical falsification, and the gradual stigmatization of dissent. By the time bars appear on the windows, the propagandists insist that the prison was built for the public good.
The MAGA movement stands against that advance because MAGA is rooted in national sovereignty, private property, religious liberty, constitutional government, secure borders, and the dignity of productive work. Those principles are irreconcilable with a doctrine that subordinates the individual to the state and treats faith, family, property, and independent thought as competing sources of allegiance.
The contrast is unmistakable. The DSA commemorates Fidel Castro. President Trump commemorates communism’s victims. The DSA curses Marco Rubio for confronting the Cuban dictatorship. Trump supports those who want Cuba to become free, prosperous, and governed by its own people. The DSA looks at Castro’s ruined island and demands ideological obedience. MAGA demands liberation from the system that has persecuted and impoverished the Cuban people.
Fidel Castro died in 2016, but the machinery he constructed continues to crush Cuba. Its people deserve reliable food, clean water, functioning electricity, safe streets, honest courts, open churches, private businesses, independent newspapers, and free elections. They deserve homes in which a family can close its curtains without fear. They deserve to speak without whispering, celebrate without surveillance, and raise their children without teaching them to hide the truth from local police.
The DSA’s centenary tribute strips away the organization’s cosmetic language and reveals the communist rot beneath it. An organization that eulogizes a butcher cannot credibly call itself democratic. A movement that venerates the jailer has no concern for the prisoner. A political faction that excuses tyranny abroad will eventually discover reasons to excuse it at home.
Castro belongs in history’s mausoleum of dictators, beside the false messiahs who promised utopia and constructed charnel houses. His ideology belongs on the ash heap. The Cuban people belong among the free. President Trump and the MAGA movement are determined to keep communism from gaining power in the United States and to expose its American apologists before their euphemisms become edicts.
The DSA has told us exactly what it worships. We should believe it.
— Roger Stone is a veteran of ten national presidential campaigns who served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents: Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. He is a speaker, pundit, and New York Times bestselling Author featured in the Netflix documentary ‘Get Me Roger Stone.’ This analysis first appeared at his Substack, StoneColdTruth.com.
I was nine years old and in Catholic grade school in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A lot could probably be said about that and the preceding Bay of Pigs, but both Democrats and Republicans recognized that communism needed to be stopped cold. Although the Russian missiles could not reach Wisconsin, we were told to hide under our desks if war broke out. The DSA nitwits are useful idiots. Trump is right in calling them out.