Castro and Chavez love the UN's UNESCO.(Fidel Castro)(Hugo Chavez)(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization )

In 1994, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) acted on a suggestion given by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that it confer an award in the name of Jose Marti, Cuba's national hero who died in 1895 during its war for independence from Spain. The award for 2005, presented by Castro on February 3 before 200,000 in Havana's Revolution Plaza, went to Marxist Hugo Chavez, the fiery anti-American leader of Venezuela. Chavez used the opportunity given him to solidify his alliance with Castro and to ratchet up his attack on the United States.

The lending of UNESCO's name to an annual pro-communist celebration says plenty about this division of the UN, and about the UN itself. It also says something about President George W. Bush, who put the U.S. back into this UN agency in 2002, ending our 18-year absence. America had withdrawn in 1984 when President Reagan cited UNESCO's blatant anti-Americanism and general hostility to freedom. But thanks to the current occupant of the White House, we are once again a UNESCO member, funding approximately 25 percent of its budget.

UNESCO was formed shortly after the birth of the United Nations in 1945. A U.S. Senate investigating panel reported in the early 1950s that its chief architects were communists Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. The organization's founding director general, Julian Huxley, hardly hid its overall purpose when he stated upon accepting the appointment: "The general philosophy of UNESCO should be a scientific world humanism, global in extent.... It can stress the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world political organization."

In 1955, Wisconsin Congressman Lawrence Smith described the organization as ...