To objectively understand what is occurring in Cuba, to gauge how these events are once again affecting the United States, and to put forth a response, one must understand the history of the Castro dictatorship and how America has related to it.
The government in Cuba is a self-described socialist-Marxist regime, as proclaimed by Fidel Castro himself. It is a murderous, perennial abuser of human rights. The proof of its 60 years of murder are legion, one of which can be found here.
Firsthand accounts of torture and decades-long incarceration in horrific conditions can be found in “Contra Toda La Esperanza (Against All Hope)” by Armando Valladares and “Cómo Llegó La Noche (How the Night Arrived)” by Huber Matos. Along with Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Huber Matos is one of the five commanders of the Cuban Revolution.
Visit Miami and talk to former political prisoners for contemporaneous proof. The American embargo—the ruse by which the dictatorship affixes blame for their incompetence and abuses—is but a fantasy. Briefly, the American embargo does not prevent the world’s 195-plus other countries from trading with Cuba, For example, Canada and Spain have for decades prolifically traded with Cuba. The American embargo has never prevented food and medicines from reaching Cuba.
And what about the millions of dollars Cuban-Americans have sent to their family members? Or did the American so-called embargo cause thousands of human rights abuses by the regime?
The solution to the six-decades crisis in Cuba, a crisis that has directly affected the United States, is thus rather straightforward. Anything that supports the Cuban dictatorship must be stopped—including tourism, money transfers, and trade. Food and medicines should only be delivered directly to the people.
The United States and like-minded governments should seek criminal indictments of Raul Castro and the rest of the country’s dictatorship at the International Criminal Court. Suggesting an armed intervention is nonsensical and deleterious to the Cuban people for, as St. Augustine noted, “The devil deludes men by despair and hope.” No one should negotiate with the regime for the rights of the people in Cuba, as doing so presumes that those rights are the dictatorship’s to grant.
Today’s Events Are No Isolated Incidents
For those assuming what is presently occurring in Cuba has no consequence to the United States, history has proven that they are sorely mistaken. A few months after the 1959 Cuban revolution was deemed successful, a miliciano came to my house in Havana to place my father on house arrest. For the next three years, my father labored to have me legally migrate to America. He succeeded and I left Cuba as an orphan at the age of six.
During the ensuing six decades I have watched how a few men enslaved a people, turning a rich country into a veritable slum while running roughshod over the United States. Despite the bluster of conservative Republican administrations and the practical acquiescence by neo-socialist Democrat administrations, the rulers in Cuba keep getting away with murder.
The regime’s murderous aggression is well-documented, from the killing of American military officer Major Rudolf Anderson, to installing strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, to welcoming airline hijackings, to the harboring of fugitives, to the exportation of socialist Marxism to Latin America, to forced waves of illegal migration, to murdering four American citizens in international airspace, to being a transshipment waypoint of cocaine into the United States, to in 2016 the U.S. embassy in Havana being attacked by an energy weapon injuring approximately 60 Americans.
Of Course Cubans Are Angry
Today we are treated to the news of multitudes demonstrating against the despondency they have endured for their entire lives. They are a desperate people that tolerate queues of eight hours to obtain their monthly allotment of things like sugar. They are a tortured people for whom medical care is sparse, rationed, and more often than not inexistent.
They are a subsumed people who cannot associate freely, cannot speak openly, and cannot partake in the riches skimmed away from them by the military ruling class. Even the international money sent to them has to be laundered through the black market to avoid the Madoff-Ponzi-Rube Goldberg official exchange rate.
It seems that Cubans have had enough of all of these sufferings. And what are the lies they have been fed for decades? Well, like all socialists, the Cuban dictatorship attributes every single one of its problems to others, in this case to the United States.
The rulers take no responsibility for squandering the country’s riches in cobalt, citrus, tobacco, pristine beaches, sugar, and most notably an industrious people. State propaganda is but serial lies deflecting the actual responsibility resting with the regime. The people have had enough. Perhaps what we see in the streets of Cuba is a harbinger of what could happen in America when we are fed up with the serial lies our government is feeding us.
Yes, It Could Happen Here
What is shocking to me is how some Americans and one dominant U.S. political party actively advocate for socialism. The demonstrations today in Cuba are a godsend by showing firsthand, in real-time, what happens when socialism takes hold.
The demonstrations in Cuba offer a live view of what can happen to the United States if it accelerates socialist policies. If Americans see the present-day peoples’ revolt in Cuba as nothing but a disturbance in yet another banana republic, or as due to the fable of the “American embargo” in combination with the China virus, then they are but pimps for instigating the same Castro-styled totalitarian state in the United States.
When my father finally escaped from Cuba many years later, I by then a young man, he gave me two salient pieces of advice. First, be grateful to America and its people for harboring me with the gift of living in its freedom. The other was ominous and prescient: communism is the disease that can destroy America.
