Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not meaningless for me, who was born into a one-party state ruled by the Communist Party which proudly called itself as such. If I wanted to be cheeky, that's your privilege showing :) There are likely some people in your proximity (if you are American, then mostly Cubans and some Russians) who have lost some family member to actual Communism.
That's more like explicit propaganda by some ancestors of cuban landlords that felt the stick after the revolution, what I meant is politically uneducated normies randomly throwing in the term in an unrelated article.
b. "felt the stick", what an euphemism for large-scale human rights violations, and not limited to "landlords".
Friends, from a survivor (a favorite word of the American left, ain't it?): actual Communist rule is very bad, most nations abandoned it in the very moment that it was possible to do so, and in the places where it can't be done, people at least try to flee.
That is why you have so many Cubans and Venezuelans in that horrible capitalist America, but not one American risks his/her life trying to swim or sail into those working class paradises.
Even in Europe the old Iron Curtain worked in one way only, to prevent people from escaping their working class paradises, although in the GDR it was called "anti-fascist protective wall".