The Democratic Socialists of America Hate Billionaires — Except Fidel Castro

The DSA's whole brand is that billionaires are the enemy of the working man. Except, apparently, when the billionaire in question ran a one-party state, jailed poets, and left the island poorer than it found it. Fidel Castro died with a personal fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions while ordinary Cubans stood in ration lines for cooking oil. That's not a footnote. That's the actual definition of the thing they claim to despise.

You'd think an organization that puts "socialist" in its name twice would have some quiet embarrassment about praising a man who imprisoned dissidents, censored the press, and ran an economy so broken his own people build rafts out of tires to escape it. Instead they mark his hundredth birthday like he's a labor hero instead of a guy who executed union organizers who got in his way. There's no reckoning with the gulags, no mention of the family members still fleeing Mariel-style decades later. Just nostalgia for the revolution and silence about what it actually produced.

This isn't really about Cuba. It's about what the DSA means when it says "billionaire." Apparently the problem was never concentrated, unaccountable power over other people's lives. The problem was billionaires being on the wrong political team. Give a man a Politburo instead of a boardroom and suddenly hoarding wealth while your citizens starve becomes a heroic anti-imperialist stand.

That double standard is the whole story here, and it's worth saying plainly: if your economic populism only applies to capitalists and not to dictators who did it worse and with secret police, it was never really about fairness. It was about which billionaires you're allowed to like.