CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Marco Rubio and the Myth of the “Communist Refugee”

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........

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