China and Cuba are the "Real" Communism

While in the picturesque college town of Trujillo, in the mountains of Venezuela, I had the rare opportunity, 32 years ago, of living among and talking with some of the best and the brightest students of Latin America at the time. I was serving an LDS mission there during the mid-70s.

On first arriving in the city, after the drive up the long ravine leading to the town, the central square opened to our view as though I'd walked into a movie set - white stucco 18th-century Catholic church, quaint shops surrounding the plaza, and a government building, seat of power for the state of Trujillo. We took residence in a youth hostel full of college students on the main townsquare, and occupied a simple bedroom room with two cots, and a communal shower.

In that huddle of young men, idealistic and passionate for the causes they would soon dedicate their entire lives, I spoke to a few of them about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

One young man, with whom I had a brief discussion, and to whom I handed a Book of Mormon, handed me a small book of essays by the positivist philosopher Bertrand Russell, and effectively bore his "testimony" of how China and Cuba were the real Communism. Russia was too much like the United States - white, European. "Look to China and Cuba for the future, as they were closest to the people," he said.

I awoke this morning with his words ringing in my ears: China and Cuba are the real Communism!

I also knew that the man in China responsible for the dog food poisonings in the United States was taken out into a field and shot. And the black men who highjacked an airplane in an attempt to land in the United States, were forced to turn back to Cuba and after a five-day trial, were also shot.

The famous World War II cartoonist, Bill Mauldin, drew a scathing political cartoon decrying the hypocrisy of Fidel Castro's uprising. In the executions that followed Castro's revolution in 1959, prisoners were tied to a pole and summarily shot. In his cartoon, Mauldin drew three prisoners tied to stakes, readied for execution.

The first man is slumped down, kneeling, head hanging, having just been shot but still alive. Above him, nonchalantly pointing a .45 caliber pistol at the condemned man's head, is a bearded, cigar-smoking Che Guevarra-looking revolutionary, uniformed like Castro, with his sleeves rolled up for the ugly work at hand.

Behind this Che-faced executioner, who has one eye closed, the other cocked open as he aims down the pistol sight to administer the coup de gras, stands another Castro-capped, rifle-toting thug tying up a second prisoner who is looking grimly at the ugly fate awaiting him. This second bearded brigand, a Marxist-Leninist, whispers in the condemned man's ears: "Think what could happen to you if we weren't idealists."

Mauldin added: "Fidel came out of the hills like Robin Hood and...began acting like the Sheriff of Nottingham."

And that is the true Communism.