August 28, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Cuba’s 1959 revolution brought Fidel Castro to power and forced countless families to make an impossible choice: stay under a communist regime or flee their homeland. Mike Gonzalez’s father once called Castro a friend, but soon discovered the price of living under his rule. With freedoms stripped away and fear taking hold, escape became the only option. Mike shares his family’s story of exile, revealing what Cuba was like before Castro and how the revolution changed everything.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, a story from our True Diversity series sponsored
by the Great Folks at the Philanthropy Roundtable, the leading
association for charitable giving in America. Their True Diversity campaign
(00:31):
is a clarion call for valuing all of us as
the unique individuals that we are. Today we meet Mike Gonzalez,
a member of their campaign and a Senior Fellow at
the Heritage Foundation. He was born in Cuba. Here's his
family's story.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I've a photo of my great grandparents in my study,
taken in nineteen twenty one, and this is my only
set of Cuban great grandparents, and they were really the
Cuban establishment. They went back to the first Spanish ships
to arrive in Cuba in fifteen eleven. My great grandfather
was elected to the first Cavata City Council in nineteen
(01:12):
oh five after the war with Spain and the US intervention.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
And none of their descendants are Cuban.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
All of the descendants are here in the United States,
and they're all one fourth Cuban, one half Cuban, one
eighth Cuban.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
They have disappeared as a Cuban family.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
This is a very Cuban establishment family that has given
their offspring to the United States, and they're all happy
Americans in a way that is a then it's a
success story.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
That's a very good story. But it also means that
that has been lost Cuba.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
The reason why I talk about this is that you
had what can only be described as cultural genocide. A
friend of mine in New York two weeks ago described
it this way. He said, if you walk out on
the streets of Havana and you point to a beautiful building,
you can be assured that the architect who drew the plans,
(02:21):
the lawyer who worked on the plans, the family who
bought the house, and the doctors of the family have
all fled. They're all here in the United States. It's
the same story as my great grandparents. You know, they're
all got Cameron Diaz.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
They're all one quarter Cuban and one half Cuban, and
all of the other.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
People who meet Cuba left and so Cuba has become
this unrecognizable place to me.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I mean, I had never been back. I left fifty
years ago, and I doubt I would go back.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
My grandfather was a politician, a a lawyer, and a journalist.
He was an essay writer who was very anti Bautista.
Fought against Baptista for decades. Batista was a fixture of
human politics from the nineteen thirties to nineteen fifty eight.
Battista was elected president freely elected in nineteen forty, and
(03:19):
then he had a coup detta.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
In nineteen fifty two. My grandfather, who died.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
In nineteen fifty four, was a man who fought against
I had to flee to the countryside several times. My
father would tell me these stories I never met him
and hide in the countryside so he wouldn't be taken away.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Batista sent policemen to my house.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
In which my grandmother would open the drawers and show
them the boxes of soap, saying, because you can see
all I have here is soap, but inside those boxes
of soap there was ammunition. And then you had my father,
who was antipatist as well and was thrown into prison.
(04:07):
My father taught law at university, and when Castro declared
himself as a communist, Castro had always denied he was
a communist.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Well, he was a rebel. My parents knew Castro.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
My mom and dad met in law school and they
met Castro in law school.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Castro was a lawyer.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And when Castro became declared himself a Communist after the
revolution had succeeded, my father quit his chair position as
a law professor at the university and they sent armed
and a delegation with weapons to my house to try
to quote unquote convince my dad to go back to university.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
And he was very resolute.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
He said, well, in a country with his Communists and
there's no law for me to teach here.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
So that was.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
It was penalized. But he was not able to get
a proper diet. He was diabetic the day he died.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
The equipment that.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Might have saved his life was being used on his
Soviet officer by the hospital. At the hospital only had
one machine. You know, I was young than I was
eleven years old. We had a farm that the government
took away, and he was used as it was a
very nice place. My aunts were married there and it
(05:26):
was used as a as it plays to entertain Surviet
generals for a time after they took it away from us.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
But I think the the.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Loss that I think I'd like to emphasize is not
just the material possessions. It's the cultural genocide aspect of things.
Communism must always destroy.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
What comes before it.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
In the case of Paul pot in Cambodia, he actually
declared the year when he entered Non pen As year one.
The Bolsheviks hated everything that was Russian and destroyed it.
The Cultural Revolution hated everything that was Chinese and sought
out to destroy it. When I lived in Hong Kong,
for example, we used to go and shop in Hollywood Road.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Hollywood Road is the street in.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Hong Kong where all the antiques are sold, and you
would come across a lot of furniture where people who
have been painted on furniture and dressers or in the
faces in many of these pieces of furniture have been erased.
And the reason for that is that the Red Guard
entered people's homes and erased the faces of people, even
(06:44):
on furniture. That's to what degree communism must exterminate whatever
culture precedes it. So what happened in Cuba is what
happened in many other countries that have had this great tragedy.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
You have communism. This is what can happen here.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And what a story you're hearing from Mike Gonzalez. Communism
must always destroy what comes before it, he said. Also,
his grandfather quit the law because under communism there is
no law. When we come back. More from Mike Gonzalez
a part of our True Diversity series brought to us
(07:24):
by the Philanthropy Roundtable. Here on our American Stories. Here
are to our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories
of history, sports, business, faith and love. Stories from a
great and beautiful country that need to be told. But
we can't do it without you. Our stories are free
to listen to, but they're not free to make. If
(07:45):
you love our stories in America like we do, please
go to our American Stories dot com and click the
donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us
keep the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories
dot Com. And we continue with our American Stories and
(08:11):
with Mike Gonzalez's story as part of our True Diversity series.
As a kid, Mike was fortunate to escape Communist Cuba,
first to Spain and later to America. He now brings
us back to his day of escape.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
It happened over fifty years ago, but I don't think
I will ever forget it. We woke up early dressed,
put a tie on, on a jacket. Even though I
was twelve, one got dressed to go on airplanes in
those days. Even though it was my first airplane flight, I.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Were a jack and a tie.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
We said goodbye to the grandmother who had raised me,
never to see her again, the woman who gave me
a glass of milk every night, who woke me up
every day, who practice verbal conjugations with me, and say
goodbye to her, never to see her again.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Then we drove over.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
To see my mother's parents, who were in tears, in
absolute tears as they said goodbye to her, even though
she was going to Spain, their land of origin. And
I couldn't understand why my mom, my mother, and her
parents were crying. To me, it was the happiest day
(09:33):
of my life, and it was the happiest day of
my life. Well borry my wedding and the birth of
my three children, of course, but it was a very
happy day of my life, so I couldn't really understand
why they were so it was such consternation.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And then we got to the airport.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
And we were all there all that held up in
a room and my mother whispered in my ear. When
we start walking towards the plane, if the authorities call
me back, you and your sister Lucy run to the
plane and you get on the plane. The plane is
an Iberian airplane. It belongs to the Kingdom of Spain,
(10:14):
and you ask for a sylum. Don't turn back, don't
look at me, just run as fast as you can
and get on that plane.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
I don't like to discuss these things.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
They're hard, they're hard memories. I don't enjoy you talking
about the way in the least.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
I arrived in Spain at the age of twelve, a
few months after the death of my.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Father, and I really realized that what shells were for
and the stories are so shells with the actual merchandise.
I had never ever seen that, No, I lie. I
had seen it once before in Cuba, in a photo
my father showed me, and I was shocked to see
(11:00):
the cans of food and sacks of flour, and the
shelves of circus I had.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I never saw that in Cuba, never ever. When meat
would arrive at the at.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
The butchers, every every person, every adult left the house
to go lineup to get whatever, and if you if
you were last one to line up, then you could
only get ground beef and have to eat piccadillo because
everything else was gone. It depends where you were in line.
There were lines everywhere. The only thing communists produce, they don't.
(11:36):
They never produce bread. They only produce breadlines.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
I remember my my mother when we arrived in Spain
and we're working on by the way, let's not forget
that Spain at this time in nineteen seventy two is
itself a poor country, and yet it was like pure
heaven compared to Cuba.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
And I remember.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Pointing to this very strange fruit and asking the store
owner what it was, and my mother breaks into tears
and she asks the store owner, can can I hold it?
And he lets me hold it, and my mother was
crying because it was a pineapple, and they had been
producing Cuba obviously he was a tropical island before. And
(12:20):
I had never in my life seen a pineapple, nor
did I have any idea of what one looked like
at the age of twelve. So that gives you some
idea of the kind of of poverty that communism produces.
But it's it's it's again. The real impoverishment that communism
(12:41):
causes is an impoverished is a spiritual, spiritual impoverishment and
a cultural impoverishment. Now that is the one that really
is the worst.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
You know, the the the idea they can not be
any God, that they can not be God, because that
takes away it plays where Castro or the Communist Party
should be in your heart.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
One thing that God gives you is hope. God gives
you hope, and communists don't want you to have hope.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Marxists don't want you to have hope.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Because it is only when you're hopeless that you will
launch the revolution they desire.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
They want you to feel completely.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Bereft of any feeling that your situation will improve, so
they will.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
They really do go after God for that reason.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
That again runs against human nature. And one thing we
do know about human nature is that we all have religion.
You can arrive at an unknown island today and the
only thing you will know for sure is that they
have music and religion. So I think the empty shells
in the cultural marketplace.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Much more searing to the human.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Condition to man than the empty shelves of the bodega.
Look I came to America in nineteen seventy four and
I landed in Queens, New York, and everybody Queens, New York,
the neighborhood where I lived, was really a a You
(14:23):
had a multitude of people, mostly of European ancestry, but
people didn't think of themselves that way.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
They were either Irish, an Italian.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Or Polish or Cuban of Puerto Rican. And by the way,
there was a name, usually a bad name. Everybody was something.
It was a bad term associated with all these groups. Everybody,
everybody was something. We haven't vastly improved on that.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
That is no longer really the case. And I think
that's a vast.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Improvement from the America that I arrived in, and that
we don't put up with racial epithets. We don't think
they're funny, we don't think they're part of polit society.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
And I think that that is a that has been
a very very good thing that has happened in this country.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
But now what we have over the last twenty or
at least ten years, is it so what we did
in the last quarter of the twentieth century was de
tried to deracialize society, tried to deracialize ourselves, and I
think we.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Succeeded with that, but now we're reracializing.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
We're going back to thinking that a person is his race.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
But there's a word for this. It's called essentialism.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Essentialism means that we are our race. You represent whatever
national origin you are, or I come from very different ancestors.
I come from ancestors who were Cubans, that come from
ancestors who were Spanish.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
I come from wealthy people, I come from poor people.
I come from the lord of the manner. I come
from the Serbs.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
And I am who I am not only because of
that DNA, but also because of the things that I
have done, the outcomes of the decisions that I have
made since since I.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Became an adult, and even as a teenager.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
If you make better decisions overall than bad decisions, you're
gonna have a very good shot in life.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
But has nothing to do with DNA, has nothing to
do with race.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Any scheme, whether it's charitable or government or educational, that
is based on race, that is based on the idea
that people are ambassadors and spokesmen for their race is
going to fail and fail miserably because it is not
true we have to save America from this.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
We only look at the lessons of.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
What happened in Cuba, what happened in China, what happened
in Cambodia, in order that we can say what we
have here in the Land of the Free.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
And you've been listening to Mike Gonzalez share with you
his story, and my goodness, what a story he told.
Here a special thanks to the folks at the Philanthropy Roundtable.
This is a part of our True Diversity series. Communists
don't produce bread, they produce bread lines. And he went
on to emphasize Mike that it's not just material poverty,
(17:25):
but worse is the spiritual poverty that communism demands. There
can't be God because Castro has to be in your heart,
he said. God gives you hope. Communists don't want you
to feel hope. Mike Gonzalez's story, the story is so
many refugees from Cuba, Eastern Bloc countries, and countries around
(17:47):
the world. Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, a story from our True Diversity series sponsored
by the Great Folks at the Philanthropy Roundtable, the leading
association for charitable giving in America. Their True Diversity campaign
(00:31):
is a clarion call for valuing all of us as
the unique individuals that we are. Today we meet Mike Gonzalez,
a member of their campaign and a Senior Fellow at
the Heritage Foundation. He was born in Cuba. Here's his
family's story.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I've a photo of my great grandparents in my study,
taken in nineteen twenty one, and this is my only
set of Cuban great grandparents, and they were really the
Cuban establishment. They went back to the first Spanish ships
to arrive in Cuba in fifteen eleven. My great grandfather
was elected to the first Cavata City Council in nineteen
(01:12):
oh five after the war with Spain and the US intervention.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
And none of their descendants are Cuban.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
All of the descendants are here in the United States,
and they're all one fourth Cuban, one half Cuban, one
eighth Cuban.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
They have disappeared as a Cuban family.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
This is a very Cuban establishment family that has given
their offspring to the United States, and they're all happy
Americans in a way that is a then it's a
success story.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
That's a very good story. But it also means that
that has been lost Cuba.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
The reason why I talk about this is that you
had what can only be described as cultural genocide. A
friend of mine in New York two weeks ago described
it this way. He said, if you walk out on
the streets of Havana and you point to a beautiful building,
you can be assured that the architect who drew the plans,
(02:21):
the lawyer who worked on the plans, the family who
bought the house, and the doctors of the family have
all fled. They're all here in the United States. It's
the same story as my great grandparents. You know, they're
all got Cameron Diaz.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
They're all one quarter Cuban and one half Cuban, and
all of the other.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
People who meet Cuba left and so Cuba has become
this unrecognizable place to me.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I mean, I had never been back. I left fifty
years ago, and I doubt I would go back.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
My grandfather was a politician, a a lawyer, and a journalist.
He was an essay writer who was very anti Bautista.
Fought against Baptista for decades. Batista was a fixture of
human politics from the nineteen thirties to nineteen fifty eight.
Battista was elected president freely elected in nineteen forty, and
(03:19):
then he had a coup detta.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
In nineteen fifty two. My grandfather, who died.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
In nineteen fifty four, was a man who fought against
I had to flee to the countryside several times. My
father would tell me these stories I never met him
and hide in the countryside so he wouldn't be taken away.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Batista sent policemen to my house.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
In which my grandmother would open the drawers and show
them the boxes of soap, saying, because you can see
all I have here is soap, but inside those boxes
of soap there was ammunition. And then you had my father,
who was antipatist as well and was thrown into prison.
(04:07):
My father taught law at university, and when Castro declared
himself as a communist, Castro had always denied he was
a communist.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Well, he was a rebel. My parents knew Castro.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
My mom and dad met in law school and they
met Castro in law school.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Castro was a lawyer.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And when Castro became declared himself a Communist after the
revolution had succeeded, my father quit his chair position as
a law professor at the university and they sent armed
and a delegation with weapons to my house to try
to quote unquote convince my dad to go back to university.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
And he was very resolute.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
He said, well, in a country with his Communists and
there's no law for me to teach here.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
So that was.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
It was penalized. But he was not able to get
a proper diet. He was diabetic the day he died.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
The equipment that.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Might have saved his life was being used on his
Soviet officer by the hospital. At the hospital only had
one machine. You know, I was young than I was
eleven years old. We had a farm that the government
took away, and he was used as it was a
very nice place. My aunts were married there and it
(05:26):
was used as a as it plays to entertain Surviet
generals for a time after they took it away from us.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
But I think the the.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Loss that I think I'd like to emphasize is not
just the material possessions. It's the cultural genocide aspect of things.
Communism must always destroy.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
What comes before it.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
In the case of Paul pot in Cambodia, he actually
declared the year when he entered Non pen As year one.
The Bolsheviks hated everything that was Russian and destroyed it.
The Cultural Revolution hated everything that was Chinese and sought
out to destroy it. When I lived in Hong Kong,
for example, we used to go and shop in Hollywood Road.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Hollywood Road is the street in.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Hong Kong where all the antiques are sold, and you
would come across a lot of furniture where people who
have been painted on furniture and dressers or in the
faces in many of these pieces of furniture have been erased.
And the reason for that is that the Red Guard
entered people's homes and erased the faces of people, even
(06:44):
on furniture. That's to what degree communism must exterminate whatever
culture precedes it. So what happened in Cuba is what
happened in many other countries that have had this great tragedy.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
You have communism. This is what can happen here.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And what a story you're hearing from Mike Gonzalez. Communism
must always destroy what comes before it, he said. Also,
his grandfather quit the law because under communism there is
no law. When we come back. More from Mike Gonzalez
a part of our True Diversity series brought to us
(07:24):
by the Philanthropy Roundtable. Here on our American Stories. Here
are to our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories
of history, sports, business, faith and love. Stories from a
great and beautiful country that need to be told. But
we can't do it without you. Our stories are free
to listen to, but they're not free to make. If
(07:45):
you love our stories in America like we do, please
go to our American Stories dot com and click the
donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us
keep the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories
dot Com. And we continue with our American Stories and
(08:11):
with Mike Gonzalez's story as part of our True Diversity series.
As a kid, Mike was fortunate to escape Communist Cuba,
first to Spain and later to America. He now brings
us back to his day of escape.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
It happened over fifty years ago, but I don't think
I will ever forget it. We woke up early dressed,
put a tie on, on a jacket. Even though I
was twelve, one got dressed to go on airplanes in
those days. Even though it was my first airplane flight, I.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Were a jack and a tie.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
We said goodbye to the grandmother who had raised me,
never to see her again, the woman who gave me
a glass of milk every night, who woke me up
every day, who practice verbal conjugations with me, and say
goodbye to her, never to see her again.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Then we drove over.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
To see my mother's parents, who were in tears, in
absolute tears as they said goodbye to her, even though
she was going to Spain, their land of origin. And
I couldn't understand why my mom, my mother, and her
parents were crying. To me, it was the happiest day
(09:33):
of my life, and it was the happiest day of
my life. Well borry my wedding and the birth of
my three children, of course, but it was a very
happy day of my life, so I couldn't really understand
why they were so it was such consternation.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And then we got to the airport.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
And we were all there all that held up in
a room and my mother whispered in my ear. When
we start walking towards the plane, if the authorities call
me back, you and your sister Lucy run to the
plane and you get on the plane. The plane is
an Iberian airplane. It belongs to the Kingdom of Spain,
(10:14):
and you ask for a sylum. Don't turn back, don't
look at me, just run as fast as you can
and get on that plane.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
I don't like to discuss these things.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
They're hard, they're hard memories. I don't enjoy you talking
about the way in the least.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
I arrived in Spain at the age of twelve, a
few months after the death of my.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Father, and I really realized that what shells were for
and the stories are so shells with the actual merchandise.
I had never ever seen that, No, I lie. I
had seen it once before in Cuba, in a photo
my father showed me, and I was shocked to see
(11:00):
the cans of food and sacks of flour, and the
shelves of circus I had.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
I never saw that in Cuba, never ever. When meat
would arrive at the at.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
The butchers, every every person, every adult left the house
to go lineup to get whatever, and if you if
you were last one to line up, then you could
only get ground beef and have to eat piccadillo because
everything else was gone. It depends where you were in line.
There were lines everywhere. The only thing communists produce, they don't.
(11:36):
They never produce bread. They only produce breadlines.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
I remember my my mother when we arrived in Spain
and we're working on by the way, let's not forget
that Spain at this time in nineteen seventy two is
itself a poor country, and yet it was like pure
heaven compared to Cuba.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
And I remember.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Pointing to this very strange fruit and asking the store
owner what it was, and my mother breaks into tears
and she asks the store owner, can can I hold it?
And he lets me hold it, and my mother was
crying because it was a pineapple, and they had been
producing Cuba obviously he was a tropical island before. And
(12:20):
I had never in my life seen a pineapple, nor
did I have any idea of what one looked like
at the age of twelve. So that gives you some
idea of the kind of of poverty that communism produces.
But it's it's it's again. The real impoverishment that communism
(12:41):
causes is an impoverished is a spiritual, spiritual impoverishment and
a cultural impoverishment. Now that is the one that really
is the worst.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
You know, the the the idea they can not be
any God, that they can not be God, because that
takes away it plays where Castro or the Communist Party
should be in your heart.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
One thing that God gives you is hope. God gives
you hope, and communists don't want you to have hope.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Marxists don't want you to have hope.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Because it is only when you're hopeless that you will
launch the revolution they desire.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
They want you to feel completely.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Bereft of any feeling that your situation will improve, so
they will.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
They really do go after God for that reason.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
That again runs against human nature. And one thing we
do know about human nature is that we all have religion.
You can arrive at an unknown island today and the
only thing you will know for sure is that they
have music and religion. So I think the empty shells
in the cultural marketplace.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Much more searing to the human.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Condition to man than the empty shelves of the bodega.
Look I came to America in nineteen seventy four and
I landed in Queens, New York, and everybody Queens, New York,
the neighborhood where I lived, was really a a You
(14:23):
had a multitude of people, mostly of European ancestry, but
people didn't think of themselves that way.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
They were either Irish, an Italian.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Or Polish or Cuban of Puerto Rican. And by the way,
there was a name, usually a bad name. Everybody was something.
It was a bad term associated with all these groups. Everybody,
everybody was something. We haven't vastly improved on that.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
That is no longer really the case. And I think
that's a vast.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Improvement from the America that I arrived in, and that
we don't put up with racial epithets. We don't think
they're funny, we don't think they're part of polit society.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
And I think that that is a that has been
a very very good thing that has happened in this country.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
But now what we have over the last twenty or
at least ten years, is it so what we did
in the last quarter of the twentieth century was de
tried to deracialize society, tried to deracialize ourselves, and I
think we.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Succeeded with that, but now we're reracializing.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
We're going back to thinking that a person is his race.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
But there's a word for this. It's called essentialism.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Essentialism means that we are our race. You represent whatever
national origin you are, or I come from very different ancestors.
I come from ancestors who were Cubans, that come from
ancestors who were Spanish.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
I come from wealthy people, I come from poor people.
I come from the lord of the manner. I come
from the Serbs.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
And I am who I am not only because of
that DNA, but also because of the things that I
have done, the outcomes of the decisions that I have
made since since I.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Became an adult, and even as a teenager.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
If you make better decisions overall than bad decisions, you're
gonna have a very good shot in life.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
But has nothing to do with DNA, has nothing to
do with race.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Any scheme, whether it's charitable or government or educational, that
is based on race, that is based on the idea
that people are ambassadors and spokesmen for their race is
going to fail and fail miserably because it is not
true we have to save America from this.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
We only look at the lessons of.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
What happened in Cuba, what happened in China, what happened
in Cambodia, in order that we can say what we
have here in the Land of the Free.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
And you've been listening to Mike Gonzalez share with you
his story, and my goodness, what a story he told.
Here a special thanks to the folks at the Philanthropy Roundtable.
This is a part of our True Diversity series. Communists
don't produce bread, they produce bread lines. And he went
on to emphasize Mike that it's not just material poverty,
(17:25):
but worse is the spiritual poverty that communism demands. There
can't be God because Castro has to be in your heart,
he said. God gives you hope. Communists don't want you
to feel hope. Mike Gonzalez's story, the story is so
many refugees from Cuba, Eastern Bloc countries, and countries around
(17:47):
the world. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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