The propaganda sheet of Cuba's Stalinist regime has almost outdone the mainstream international media in vilifying Jesse Helms. It's a close-run thing. You be the judge:

“To many around the world,” recently wrote London's Financial Times,“he was little less than a monster.”

"Few senators in the modern era have done more to resist the tide of progress," concluded the New York Times when Helms retired in 2003.

"He fought for the values of the old confederacy. He resisted the new South. He resisted the opportunity to fight for a more perfect union," said Rev. Jesse Jackson (who bellowed “Viva Fidel!-Viva Che!” while arm in arm with Castro in Havana in 1984.

“It is hard even now to think of him with charity,” runs the obituary in the UK Guardian. Helms was “a baleful influence” with a “malign impact” on American foreign policy. “He caused an international furore by joining forces with Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana to push through the Helms-Burton Act, extending American jurisdiction to international companies trading with Cuba.”

“There are men in the world who become paradigms of disgrace to the human race,” wrote a Castro-court eunuch in Cuba's official paper, Granma, this past Monday.“A titan of intolerance!” continues the scribbling eunuch in this propaganda organ for a regime that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin's and executed more in its first three years in power than Hitler's murdered in its first six.

“Helms was the head of a gang in Washington that was prepared to destroy the world!” continues the sniveling hack for a regime that brought the world closest to Nuclear devastation by asking, begging and finally trying to trick Nikita Khrushchev into launching a surprise nuclear attack on the U.S.

“He brought tragedy to millions of human beings around the world, including millions in his own nation,” declares this apparatchik for a regime that plunged a nation that enjoyed a standard of liver higher than half of Europe's in 1958, to a level of Haiti's today. In the process, this regime tripled Cuba's suicide rate, making its subjects the most suicidal in the Western Hemisphere, and drove tens of thousands of them to fight bare-handed against Tiger sharks while desperately fleeing the glories of free healthcare and education. All this to escape from a nation formerly swamped with immigrants, primarily fellow first-worlders from Europe.

“Castro has done good things for Cuba,” said a (hopefully oblivious to Cuban history) Colin Powell in 2001. Castro was quick to return the compliment. “Mr Powell is a man with his own character and authority." That someone with Powell's level of “character and authority” appears poised to join the Obama campaign as reported recently by Robert Novak, should not be surprising, especially to Fidel Castro.

The enlightened world's tantrum against Jesse Helms is a showpiece of hypocrisy and ingratitude. Imitation, as we all know, is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, Senator Helms by co-authoring the infamous Helms-Burton law in 1996-- the one that ignited an “international furore”according to the UK Guardian-- merely sought to imitate the British Parliament, the United Nations, the European Union, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, Charles Rangel, Jesse Jackson, The World Council of Churches, the Council on Foreign Relations, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the London Times, etc.

With this act, Senator Helms and his Republican colleague Dan Burton of Indiana, merely sought to apply the measures all the enlightened parties and persons mentioned above urged against an authoritarian regime (segregationist South Africa) to a totalitarian regime (Stalinist Cuba), by applying similar economic sanctions.

He has never been forgiven for so dramatically (if unwittingly) showcasing their hypocrisy.

You'd never know it from the mainstream media, much less the academic 'Cuba experts” they habitually interview, but the so-called Cuban embargo-- far from a malicious ploy by a bullying superpower to starve and cow a tiny, innocent nation wishing only to exert its independence—was in fact a last-ditch response to Stalinist mass larceny of U.S. property involving the murder of U.S. citizens.

In the summer of 1960, Castro ordered his KGB-trained security forces to storm into 5,911 U.S owned businesses in Cuba and steal them all at gunpoint. His haul was almost $2 billion, the biggest heist of U.S. property in history—bigger than all the rest combined. Rubbing his hands in triumphant glee, Castro boasted at maximum volume into a phalanx of mics to the entire world that he was freeing Cuba from "Yankee economic slavery!" (Che’s term, actually) and that "he would never repay a penny!"

This is the only promise Fidel Castro has ever kept in his life. A few owners who resisted, like Howard Anderson, whose Jeep dealership was stolen, and Tom Fuller, whose family farm was stolen, were promptly murdered by Castro and Che's firing squads, alongside the thousands of Cubans who resisted the Stalinist theft. Hence “the Cuban Embargo.”

By 1995 the embargo was ridden with loopholes. In 1974, at Henry Kissinger's instigation, all subsidiaries of U.S. companies worldwide were free to transact with Cuba. Much worse, many foreign corporations, primarily Canadian, European and Mexican, had moved into the stolen U.S. plant and property in Cuba and were merrily operating them in joint ventures with Cuba's Stalinist regime, employing a labor force that averages $15 a month in wages and is prevented from striking under penalty of firing squad or torture chamber. These joint venturers found themselves doing quite well.

In 1996 Senators Jesse Helms and Dan Burton sought to put an end to this outrage with their Act, also known as the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, and met hysterical resistance at every turn, primarily from the same sources who shrieked to high heavens about inhuman exploitation in apartheid South Africa. Continued...