Cuban Americans in Miami area hate it when the GOP MAGA ex-president’s plans to run the US like an autocracy/ dictatorship is compared to the governing style in Cuba, under the President Fidel Castro.

Unfortunately, this is a truth that they can face now or post a possible Trump win.

The revolution led by Fidell Castro did not develop overnight. At the beginning he was supported by most Cubans including the wealthy and the well-educated but this changed once reality took hold after 1959. The exodus of Cubans to Florida didn’t occur until much later

As per the 2007 Smithsonian Magazine’s article by Natasha Geiling, “How Cuba Remembers Its Revolutionary Past and Present:”

“All classes of Cubans, including the very rich, looked to the young and charismatic Fidel Castro as their hope for democracy and change. Castro, a young lawyer trained at the University of Havana, belonged to a wealthy landowning family, but espoused a deep nationalism and railed against corruption and gambling. “We all thought this was the Messiah,” says Maria Christina Halley, one of Uva’s childhood friends. Her family later fled to the United States and now she teaches Spanish in Jacksonville, Florida.”

Two ex-Cubans tell why Cuban Americans need to face reality…

As per the July 14, 2021 America article by Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu, “I’ve lived under Donald Trump and Fidel Castro. Both taught me the importance of defending the truth:”

Excerpts:

“¡Cuidado con el coco! This warning about a mythical character, never seen but feared, was a staple of childhood in Cuba. A boogeyman, el coco kept us in line by making us afraid of the unknown. But I was also taught that there was another threatening creature, a real one: The United States was the ultimate el coco, whose big toothy shores wanted to devour our island. Fearing it would keep us in line.”

“But recently many Cubans have dared to cross that line, gathering for protests over a lack of food and medicine, rising prices and the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the cries of the community have gone deeper, asking for basic freedoms in a desperate bid for the world’s attention. Artists, writers, musicians and journalists who have dared to speak publicly have been swiftly taken by security forces, their whereabouts unknown. Internet service has been shut down. The protests, which began in small towns and spread throughout the country, are a rare sight in a country in which unauthorized public gatherings are illegal and have been met with swift crackdowns.”

“Elementary school in Fidel Castro’s Cuba was a strange place where history began with Christopher Columbus, moved ahead centuries to Cuba’s independence from Spain and then moved straight to “La Revolución.” Our other subjects included Marxism-Leninism (yes, in elementary school) and rigorous physical exercise in the Soviet model, a propaganda tool on the world’s stage. Our teachers came to school in army fatigues to underscore how under siege our country was from the imperialist power to the north and the dissidents within. Communist party affiliation was required for jobs and disclosed at school by each child. Those who were young communists wore an official blue and white bandana with their school uniform—pioneros on the front lines of the fight for a new world order.”

“This was my childhood. It made me prize critical thought and truth-telling as fundamental human rights. It also made me aware that the extremes meet in the end and that whether on the left (as in Cuba) or on the right (as in Trumpism), extremism for the sake of power results in the erosion of human thought, truth and agency. The Gospel I believe in stands up against lies and against anything that assails the common good. These are not values shared by either extreme.”

“At the height of the pandemic, I asked someone to please mask up or move away, only to hear them cry, “It’s a free country!” People who have no idea what it is to have no freedom under a brutally repressive regime bandy about phrases like this. It is insulting. It is the outcome of a world in which ideologies no longer mean anything and at the same time have intensified and appear to mean everything. Pope Francis is called a Communist because he dares speak about the poor and the environment. Communist China has one the most virulent forms of capitalism on the planet and victimizes both the poor and the environment.”

“When young people in Cuba today shout “Libertad!” (wearing masks and desperate for vaccines, which many “free” U.S. citizens refuse to take), their cry is about their most basic survival as human beings, the need for food and medicine. It is about being lied to their entire lives, about the grinding reality of being unable to even express one’s thoughts for fear of one’s life. To protest in the streets is to brave imprisonment or death. As one eloquent young man put it on a widely shared video, “We are starving while they build hotels.”

“It is possible that this man already has been identified and imprisoned, the brutal repression we always knew awaited the person engaging in any act of defiance. But notice the contradiction: They are building hotels while the people starve. This is the truth no one wants to talk about because the powerful on the left and on the right benefit from it. A truly communist country would not build tourist hotels—that’s capitalism. A truly democratic country would not pass voter suppression laws like those being sponsored by Republican legislatures; that is undemocratic and dangerous.”

“The majority of Cuban Americans in the United States sold themselves to Trumpism because he waved el coco of socialism at them. But in 2020, Donald J. Trump lost. The threat of the United States under a Biden administration will not stoke the same fears in Cuba. This is the greatest hope I have. There is no coco to scare the Cuban people with anymore.”

“When Pope Francis brokered a rapprochement between the United States and Cuba in 2014, he knew exactly what he was doing: Take away el coco, deal a blow to the Cuban propaganda machine, bring about relations people to people. Undo the false ideological labels. Help all. I hope that those of us who live in the world of both/and truth-telling will prevail across the 90 miles that separate us. If we focus on the truth of the common good in Cuba, here and everywhere, then the path is clear. Adiós, el coco.”

As per an ex-CIA agent A.J. Fuentes Twombly’s personal account in her August 24, 2020 NBC Think article, “Trump and the RNC should remind Cuban voters of Fidel Castro:”

Excerpts:

“As the daughter of Cuban refugees, I grew up so enamored with American freedom and what it meant for my community that I joined the CIA as an undercover officer and served my country proudly on three tours, including one to Afghanistan. During that time, I witnessed corrupt leaders destroy democracy around the world in many of the same ways that Fidel Castro had in Cuba, forcing my family to flee. Now I’m seeing similar tactics employed by Donald Trump.”

“While it’s understandable that Cuban immigrants once felt an affinity for the GOP as the party that faced down communism and championed economic advancement, my fellow Cuban Americans must come to grips with the reality that the actions of the current Republican administration bear deep similarities to the Cuban government our families fled from. As the Republican National Convention kicks off its effort to re-elect President Donald Trump, it’s time for Cuban voters to admit that the GOP is no longer their political home.”

See: Before Trump was anti-Cuba, he wanted to open a hotel in Havana/ the Conversation …

Note: This blog was last updated 6/26/2024.