Jamie Glazov: Sean Penn's Cuba odyssey

"Penn is now taking his act to Castro's Cuba, a communist dictatorship that has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world. As 'The Black Book of Communism' has documented, half a million human beings have passed through Cuba's gulag. Since Cuba's total population is only around 11 million, that gives Castro's despotism the highest political incarceration rate per capita on earth. There have been more than 15,000 executions by firing squad. Torture has been institutionalized; myriad human-rights organizations have documented the regime's use of electric shock, dark coffin-sized isolation cells and beatings to punish 'anti-socialist elements.' The Castro regime's barbarity is best epitomized by the Camilo Cienfuegos plan, the program of horrors followed in the forced-labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Forced to work almost naked, prisoners were made to cut grass with their teeth and to sit in latrine trenches for long periods of time.

"The horrifying experience of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who endured 22 years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom, is a testament to the regime's barbarity. Valladares' memoir, 'Against All Hope,' serves as Cuba's version of Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago.' Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take 'baths' in human feces and urine.

"Don't expect Sean Penn to be including these facts in the story he tells when he leaves Castro's communist paradise. Expect glowing praise for the dictator and the dictatorship. Indeed, expect more and the same from what we've already seen in Penn's, and the left's, dance and flirtation with tyranny, despotism and death."