Last week the Environmental Protection Agency kicked off its celebration of “Hispanic Heritage Month” with an e-mail message featuring Che Guevara along with his famous slogan, “Hasta la Victoria Siempre.”

Let’s hope these U.S. civil servants were innocently unaware of some of Che Guevara’s other slogans:

• “The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!”

• “Against those hyenas [Americans] there is no option but extermination!”

• “We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! (the U.S.)”

• “We must keep our hatred [against the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysm!”

• “If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”

U.S. taxpayers pay U.S. government employees to celebrate the author of the charming sentiments above. Fine. As usual only a few Americans of Cuban heritage have complained about the EPA’s “gaffe.” As usual, most of the people Che Guevara craved to incinerate view this EPA “gaffe” as silly obsession by hyper-sensitive and loudmouthed Cuban-Americans.

But Che Guevara’s hate-obsession was actually the U.S. Most of the defenseless Cubans he murdered in cold blood, he murdered because he thought they were affiliated with the U.S. (“U.S.–Backed” Batista, the CIA, etc.) In fact probably 90 percent of the men (and boys, and some women) his regime murdered had no affiliation with Batista whatsoever and most had fought the Batista regime — but alas, as non-communists.

Since the U.S. government insists on these ethnic celebrations here’s an idea: Instead of celebrating a foreign Hispanic who dreamed of incinerating and entombing millions of U.S. citizens and obliterating the U.S. as a political entity, why not celebrate a U.S. citizen of Hispanic heritage who voluntarily put his life repeatedly on the line to defend the U.S. Better still, this American of Hispanic heritage played a key role in capturing the foreign Hispanic who craved to murder millions of Americans.

EPA, meet Felix Rodriguez. Some background:

As a 19-year-old volunteer for Brigada 2506 (the Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters) Cuban-born Felix Rodriguez infiltrated Communist Cuba weeks before what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, organizing underground freedom-fighters, planning the sabotage of key roads and bridges, staying a step ahead of the Castro’s secret police and their KGB coaches. Almost half of his Band of Brothers in the infiltration teams died in front of Soviet-armed firing squads, after KGB-tutored torture. Felix knew the odds. He volunteered anyway, along with hundreds of other young Cuban exiles of the time.

After the Knights of Camelot stabbed the Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters in the back on the bloody Bay of Pigs beachhead, Rodriguez again foiled the Communist dragnet by slipping into the Venezuelan embassy and escaping a year later to Florida. After the Knights of Camelot stabbed the freedom-fighters again and twisted the blade with the Kennedy-Khrushchev swindle (that pledged the U.S. to protect Castro’s Soviet beachhead) Rodriguez, along with hundreds of his Bay of Pigs Band of Brothers enlisted in the U.S. Army.