Open your eyes, America – the “Land of Opportunity” that immigrants like myself came to revere is on the cusp of sadly being lost to history. As thousands take to the streets in protest (a constitutionally protected right), I’m fearful that we have lost our way, protesting for all the wrong reasons – gravitating closer and closer toward a socialist and/or communist government.
No matter how many times director Michael Moore says it, Cuba is not a beacon of hope; it is not an economic success story. As a Cuban refugee, I can confidently deliberate Cuba’s post-revolutionary downfall and the horrid impacts of communism. I am a freedom fighter and not aligned with any political party.
I was born in a Cuba that was a beautiful democracy, run very similarly to what we have here in the United States. There were people on the right and the left, and they disputed political ideas; however, it was always done with mutual respect. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Cuba began to shift politically; it was taken hostage by an extreme left looking to destroy the good that Cuba stood for. Similar to what we are seeing in the U.S. with organizations such as antifa, this hate-filled ideology lived to agitate, defame and destroy. They would label you with vile and derogatory terms should you not conform – sound familiar?
I saw this poison first-hand, watching it corrupt an entire society in ways that nobody ever would have expected. You have to ask how this happened in a country where people are highly educated, society is functioning, and all established institutions protect the less capable, sick, and elderly. What happened? Like other great empires, they self-destructed.
It begins with a small group, like a tiny cancer cell – it spreads throughout the body, consuming all nutrients, destroying the immune system. I saw how they abused people using their own freedoms against them, all because you simply didn’t agree with the way they were thinking.
One morning we woke up to a different system, a system of government control — annulling every established institution and replacing them with what they thought would function. They destroyed what cost so many lives in the past for their own egos to prove that they could do something better in their own game of control – the same methods of terrorism against the population the government used to control every private industry. They created the worst disaster anyone could imagine, reducing everyone to such poverty in a once-rich country.
Citizens had to wait for hours in line to buy a loaf of bread. This is not a tale, not in a book I read — it is my own experience. I see this now when I turn on the television here, events repeating with the same small groups dividing our citizens and trying to destroy by creating chaos. What started as a “peaceful protest” ended up in the most dramatic destruction of property and abuse of the authorities. When citizens cross the line and cease respecting our laws and attack the principles of this society, that is the beginning of the end of that society.
Despite our political divides, why is it that Cuban-Americans vote overwhelmingly for conservative candidates as opposed to progressives?
Open your eyes America, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Dr. Julio Antonio del Marmol is the son of the principal financier behind Castro’s Revolution, Leonardo del Marmol. And so it was that, at the age of 12, Julio Antonio became the youngest Commander in the Rebel Army (“el Commandantico”) and the Commander-in-Chief of the Young Commandos of the Rebel Army. In this position, he was a part of Fidel’s inner circle, and so saw firsthand the plans the Castros and their friend, Che Guevara, had for the island of Cuba. Julio Antonio, undetected for 10 years, took secrets right out of Fidel Castro’s very office and transmitted them to U.S. Naval Intelligence at Guantanamo until his cover was blown in 1971. He became the most-hunted spy in all of Cuba, codenamed by Castro himself as “the Lightning.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member