Por Nick Estes
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| Marco Rubio, image by Wikipedia |
Fox News host Martha MacCallum recently interviewed New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, clashing over whether the DSA’s platform is “anti-American” and challenging Gordillo’s immigrant roots. MacCallum reminded Gordillo that his family left Peru, suggesting their reasons might be related to the communist uprising led by the Shining Path and not, as Gordillo claims, related to U.S. imperialism. MacCallum contrasted this by discussing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Cuban immigrant family’s embrace of American capitalism, weaponizing it against Gordillo’s embrace of socialist policies. She then played a clip of Rubio’s opening remarks at the recent Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, where he attempted to debunk the myth that communism sounds good in theory but is bad in practice.
“Communism does not sound good in theory,” Rubio said. “The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.”
Is that so? Let’s subject that claim to the cold light of historical reality.
By framing the debate around these two men, MacCallum tried to push the classic “good immigrant versus the bad immigrant” trope. The underlying implication is that, just like Rubio’s family, Gordillo’s fled communist violence. This sets up a neat, right-wing rhetorical trap: how can ostensible “victims of communism” oppose capitalism, the very system that supposedly saved them? However, a look at actual history obliterates this narrative: the truth is that neither Rubio’s nor Gordillo’s families fled communism at all.
According to Gustavo Gordillo, his family fled Peru because of U.S. imperialism and neoliberal policies—that is, capitalist disaster, not communist uprising. Instead of escaping Marxism, they left their home in the 1990s during a wave of aggressive, U.S.-backed economic “shock therapy” that resulted in the fire-sale selling off of public services and crushing hyperinflation. At the time, the CIA funneled millions of dollars to Peruvian intelligence agencies, ostensibly for anti-narcotics operations. In reality, U.S. intelligence agencies were fully aware that Peruvian intelligence and military officials used these resources to operate brutal, state-sanctioned death squads against groups they claimed were communist “terrorists”—a label weaponized against many Indigenous communities, regardless of their actual political alignments. Gordillo’s family was displaced by the violent fallout of capitalist extraction, not socialist policy; they were refugees of a brutal “free market” experiment backed by death squads, not the Shining Path.
Marco Rubio’s family, on the other hand, left Cuba in 1956—immigrating to the United States a full three years before Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban Revolution, ever took power. Throughout his years in politics, Rubio has consistently embellished his family story, even claiming to be the “son of exiles.” He frequently called Castro a “thug” for forcing Cuban Americans, like his parents, off their beloved island. However, his entire career in far-right politics has been built on this fabricated myth that his parents fled the Cuban Revolution, a fiction calculated to bolster his strident anti-Castro and anticommunist bona fides among the so-called Cuban “exile” community in Southern Florida.
The historical reality is that his family left Cuba during the reign of Fulgencio Batista—a brutal, U.S.-backed dictator. Ironically, it was same regime that targeted fellow anticommunist and anti-Castro fanatic, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father, who was beaten for opposing the Batista regime and later obtained political asylum in the United States. During this era, the United States backed Batista’s suppression of political dissent to protect corporate profits. Pre-revolutionary Cuba functioned essentially as an American corporate playground: American corporations controlled nearly all of Cuba’s nickel and mineral exports and owned nearly all of its electric and phone services. Furthermore, the infamous United Fruit Company owned 40 percent of the sugar production and three-quarters of the island’s arable lands. When the Cuban Revolution finally took power, it nationalized and expropriated these exploitative corporate industries, redistributing their wealth back to the Cubans themselves.
In short, Rubio’s parents didn’t flee the revolution—they fled the oppressive corporate extraction that made the revolution necessary in the eyes of many.
Now, we come to the ultimate historical irony. Rubio wants to reintroduce the very system of extraction and plunder back to his parents’ homeland that likely led to their initial departure in the first place. He wants to make Cuba “great again” by returning it to its prior state of pupilage under the American boot. This glaring hypocrisy is abundantly clear in his fanatical obsession with overthrowing the government of Cuba and his recent histrionics around how Cuba has sponsored leftist movements in the United States. Ultimately, corporate media uses the “communist refugee” myth not out of empathy for people fleeing violence, but as an ideological shield to protect Western imperialism from critique.
Ultimately, corporate media uses the “communist refugee” myth not out of empathy for people fleeing violence, but as an ideological shield to protect Western imperialism from critique. And in the case of Rubio, it shows how capitalism in theory and in practice is a world made of awesome violence and propaganda, where even its ostensible victims are systematically hollowed out until they become its most strident, genocidal defenders.
This piece first appeared on Red Scare.
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).
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