Cuba a beacon of democracy for the oppressive US?

Where do public colleges and universities find folks like this???

When I was a college student in the mid-1980s, Illinois State University had the old Stalinist in the English Department, daily agitating for a socialist revolution from 8-4 before going home to his mini-mansion in his Mercedes. We also had the guy in my beloved Political Science Department who quoted Lenin and Marx in his US government classes and hung pictures of himself with Castro and Ortega all over his office -- until he inherited his uncle's multi-million dollar commercial real estate empire and moved out west to live the life of the capitalist oppressor.

I thought of these guys today as I read a piece by University of Minnesota professor August Nimitz on (Red)StarTribune.com. He begins with standard leftist anti-war ranting, saying:

I agree that gross human rights violations are commonplace in Cuba -- in the US-occupied Cuban territory of Guantanamo! The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have their immediate roots in Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo. For these and other reasons -- particularly, the bipartisan offensive against domestic democratic rights in the name of fighting terrorism -- I reject the democratic pretensions of Washington and those who claim to speak on its behalf, such as Weiner and Buchanan.

But then he continues on to argue that because of Castro, the people of Cuba have greater political and economic rights than Americans!

I hope that Nimitz sleeps well tonight, dreaming of the revolution -- probably in a McMansion with a couple of SUVs in the garage. And I hope those dreams accurately reflect the historical reality that when the Communist Revolution comes, it is usually the bourgeois intellectuals like him who are among the first to be shot by the revolutionaries.