“It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.”

Preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World

While Cuba’s Ladies in White attempted to peacefully observe International Human Rights Day in Havana the other day, surrounded by menacing supporters of dictator Raúl Castro shouting insults at them, Occupy Wall Street protesters in Lower Manhattan were busy depriving a television production company of its First Amendment right to film an episode of a network program at Foley Square.

The NBC television crew, which had a city permit, was trying to film part of an episode for the popular Law & Order: Special Victims Unit series, which included a sequence depicting the recent OWS activities at Zuccotti Park. About 100 occupiers crashed the set, forcing the production to shut down. “We made it so that they could not exploit us, and that’s awesome,” occupier Tammy Schapiro, 29, of Brooklyn, triumphantly told a reporter.

It is ironic that the same Occupy protesters who have been claiming a First Amendment right to live on public property now censor others because they don’t approve of the content of their speech.

Here in Miami we understand the evil of interfering with free-speech rights better than in other parts of this nation. In Miami-Dade County, the population includes 1.2 million residents born in other countries. Those of us born in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Vietnam are especially sensitive to freedom-of-speech issues because we have lived under governments that do everything they can to restrict that freedom.

It is thus no accident that the small band of Occupy Miami protesters still living in tents downtown have elicited no meaningful support from this community.

From the beginning it has been troublesome that the OWS protesters have included anarchists and Marxist revolutionaries with their own anti-capitalism agendas. One of them, in Manhattan, was arrested after threatening to throw a Molotov cocktail through a Macy’s window. Others have been carrying signs printed by the Workers World Party. According to the WWP, “Capitalism rests on the exploitation of the many by the few. . . . Workers World fights for a socialist society — where the wealth is socially owned and production is planned to satisfy human need.”

At a recent OWS meeting in Manhattan, an organizer began her presentation by singing the IWW anthem, Solidarity Forever, the battle song of Eugene V. Debs, Joe Hill, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and other radical labor leaders of the early 1900s. “All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.”

While the occupiers push ahead with their “us versus them” anti-Walmart, anti-Citibank, anti-capitalism campaigns, the octogenarian controllers of the 1959 Communist Revolution in Cuba are frantically trying to put their failed statist system in reverse. They are now allowing a partial return of private property in consumer gadgets, housing and automobiles, and of limited capitalism in small businesses, farming, private employment and government loans. The Occupy activists should visit Havana ASAP and find out why.

Angel Castillo, Jr., a Cuban-American lawyer, is a former newspaper reporter and editor for The New York Times, The Miami Herald, and other publications who practices employment law in Miami.