Venezuelan operative Livia Acosta gives a solidarity fist pump to the Bolivarian Revolution.

CARACAS - The Miami consulate that serves as a governmental affairs liaison to thousands of Venezuelan expats living in the Southern United States will be shut down, according to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in an announcement on Friday. After Venezuelan diplomat Livia Acosta was recently expelled after a Univsion documentary played a recording of her conspiring with susected terrorists and radicals from Iran, Cuba and Mexico, that were allegedly plotting cyberattacks on U.S. installations, Chavez announced that he would not expel a U.S. diplomat in return, but would shut down the consulate "while we assess the situation."

A subsequent report revealed documentation that showed that Acosta was also a member of Chavez's secret police, and that her rise to a diplomatic post came in just eight years after starting out as a leader of Chavez's violent and illegal Bolivarian Circles, then subsequently receiving intelligence training in Cuba, before moving up the ranks to become a diplomat in the United States. 

The Argentine assassin Che Guevara, whose image is running a close race with Mao Tse Tung as the most capitalized of any anti-capitalist in history, has enjoyed a posthumous popularity that is inversely proportional to his competence in life. Guevara's "foco theory" of guerrilla warfare lasted about as long as he and his "peasant" revolutionary regiment lasted in the jungles of Bolivia. 

Today, the eponymous "Che" as he is modernly known, graces the walls of reluctant terrorists and dime store revolutionaries throughout the world, from Obama campaign volunteers to Palestinian terror apologists like Hatem Abudayyeh, a Chicago radical whose office was shown to be adorned with a Che poster in what was otherwise an innocuous 2004 PBS documentary on immigrants in America.

 
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (left) imprisoned and tortured Armando Valladares (right) for
refusing to support the communist revolution with sufficient ardor.

Imagine a professor at a popular Division I university sending an email to an ex-political prisoner, who spent 22 years in a Cuban gulag, simply to insult and harangue him for expressing an opinion on his oppressor. The target of the hate-mail was Armando Valladares, who was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International when he was locked up and tortured in a Cuban prison for 22 years. The email, sent directly to Valladares, told the aging victim that he “deserve(d) to be in jail” because of the “stupidities that you wrote.”

 
New York Times writer Herbert Matthews (left) takes notes from Fidel Castro in 1957. 

The New York Times Travel section published "The 45 Places to Go in 2012" on Friday, and coming in at number ten was Cuba, whose dilapidated streets and infrastructure travel writer Victoria Burnett calls "sultry," and its colonial villas "gorgeous."

Burnett notes, "The only thing that lies between Americans and the sultry streets of Havana these days is the Florida Straits, since the Obama administration has widened the kind of travel allowed." The paper of record neglects to mention that the Castro dictatorship has arrested an American, Alan Gross, and put him into one of its multiple gulags that dot the island. 
 

The regime's oppression has also become more aggressive towards women and minorities, even as it claims to be "reforming."