If you’ve seen any of the video footage from within the protests in Cuba that have lit the island since Sunday, July 11, you’ve probably questioned once or twice, “Why are the Cubans protesting, and what are they protesting about? Those are fair questions. Whatever the source(s) of the unrest and the response by the Cuban government to the protests, it’s fair to say that something is just not right.
So I’LL ask the question: “What IS going on in Cuba?”
Facts
To objectively understand what is occurring in Cuba, to gauge how these events are once again affecting the United States, and to respond, 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, non-stop abuser of human rights. The proof of its 60 years of murder is legion.
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 pretty 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 divisive 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 Not 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 militia showed up in Havana to place men on house arrest. For years, locked-up men desperately worked to find ways for their family members to get to Miami to get away from Cuban Marxism. Yes, some stories tracked thousands of Cubans who successfully made the journey by boat. Sadly, there are just as many stories of Cubans who lost their lives just trying to get to a land where they could live free.
During the last six decades, most of those Cubans 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 force 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 in the U.S., we are treated to the news of multitudes demonstrating against the despondency they have endured for their entire lives. They are desperate people who tolerate eight hours’ queues 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, nonexistent.
They are an enslaved 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.
And it WILL destroy the US in the United States if we do not soon turn away from Totalitarianism of ANY name.
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 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 COVID-19 virus, then we are but pimps for instigating the same Castro-styled totalitarian state in the United States.
When one man held prisoner in a Castro jail for several decades finally escaped from Cuba many years later, he gave Cubans who fled the island and made homes in the U.S. two salient pieces of advice. First, be grateful to America and its people for harboring Cuban immigrants with the gift of living in its freedom. The other was ominous: communism is the disease that can destroy America.
It’s disheartening to hear members of the U.S. Congress place blame on Capitalism, the United States, for the lack of free trade, with little or no regard for the history of Cuba or the happenings since the Fidel Castro revolution sixty years ago. Yes, the U.S. has levied and maintained tough trade restrictions between our two nations. But more than 190 other nations trade with Cuba! It’s sad to hear Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) blame the U.S. embargo for ALL of Cuba’s problems. In doing that, she legitimizes the oppressive treatment of Cubans by its own government.
The bureaucrats and their cronies in Cuba do NOT do without. They live in splendor with no lack of any of the necessities the Cuban people are forced to live without.
But AOC’s statements should surprise NO ONE. Her objective for the U.S. begins with shelling capitalism to replace it with socialism.
If this Cuban crisis does nothing more than show the true colors of those from the political left in the U.S., it’s been worth it. There is NO nation on Earth today or any past that has embraced Socialism and all its egregious treatment of its people that still exists today! If any version of Socialism was effective, why are citizens of socialist nations all over the world still trying to flee those countries to come to the U.S.?
Maybe this crisis in Cuba was a Godsend to the United States. At least now, as hard as it is to say, Americans seeing Cubans struggling across the board in horrible conditions implemented by their government might be the key for our nation to padlock ANY talks of socialism here.
Let’s hope so!
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