June 21, 2023 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, "If We Get Called Back..." Mike Gonzalez tells this story of his family escaping the clutches of Castro's communist dictatorship.
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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.
And none of their descendants are Cuban. All of the
descendants are here in the United States, and they're all
one fourth Cuban, one half Cuban, one eighth Cuban. They
have disappeared as a Cuban family. This is a very
(01:35):
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. That's a
very good story. But it also means that that has
been lost Cuba. The reason why I talk about this
(01:59):
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, the lawyer who worked on
(02:22):
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. They're
all one quarter Cuban and one half Cuban, and all
of the other people who meet Cuba left and so
(02:44):
Cuba has become this unrecognizable place to me. I mean,
I had never been back. I left fifty years ago,
and I doubt I would go back. My grandfather was
a politician, a a lawyer, and a journalist. He was
an essay writer who was very anti Bautista, fought against
(03:06):
Bautista 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 then he
had a coup detta in nineteen fifty two. My grandfather,
who died in nineteen fifty four, was a man who
(03:28):
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. Batista sent policemen to my house, in which
my grandmother would open the drawers and show them the
(03:49):
boxes of soap, saying, because you can see all I
have here is soap, but inside the boxes of soap
there was ammunition. And then you had my father, who
was antipatist as well and was thrown into prison. My
father taught law at university, and when Castro declared himself
(04:13):
as a communist, Castro had always denied he was a communist. Well,
he was a rebel. My parents knew Castro. My mom
and dad met in law school and they met Castro
in law school. Castro was a lawyer. And when Castro
became declared himself a Communists after the revolution had succeeded,
my father quit his chair position as a law professor
(04:37):
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. And he
was very resolute. He said, well, in a country with
his Communism, there's no law for me to teach here.
So that was it was penalized. But he was not
(04:57):
able to get a proper diet. He was diabetic the
day he died. The equipment that 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
(05:20):
used as it was a very nice place. My aunts
were married there and it was used as a as
it plays to entertain Surviet generals for a time after
they took it away from us. But I think the
the loss that I think I'd like to emphasize is
(05:42):
not just the material possessions. It's the cultural genocide aspect
of things. Communism must always destroy what comes before it.
In the case of Paul pot in Cambodia, he actually
declared the year when he entered Non pen As year one.
(06:03):
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.
Hollywood Road is the street in Hong Kong where all
the antiques are sold, and you would come across a
lot of furniture where people have been painted on furniture
(06:27):
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 on furniture. That's to
what degree communism must exterminate whatever culture precedes it. So
(06:55):
what happened in Cuba is what happened in many other
countries that have had this great tragedy of 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.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
When we come back.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
More from Mike Gonzalez a part of our True Diversity
series brought to us 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
(07:42):
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If 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
(08:11):
Stories and 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 were a jack and a tie. We said goodbye
(08:51):
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. Then we drove over to
(09:13):
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 of
(09:33):
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. And then we got to
the airport and we were all there, all that held
(09:55):
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,
and you ask for a sylum. Don't turn back, don't
(10:18):
look at me, just run as fast as you can
and get on that plane. I don't like to discuss
these things. They're hard, they're hard memories. I don't enjoy
you talking about the way in the least. I arrived
in Spain at the age of twelve, a few months
after the death of my father, and I really realized
(10:42):
that what shells were for and in 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 the cancer of food in sacks of
(11:03):
flour and the shelves of circus. Had I never saw
that in Cuba, never ever. When meat would arrive at
the at the butchers, every every person, eavy adult left
the house to go line up to get whatever and
if you if you were last one to line up,
(11:24):
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. They never produce bread. They
only produce breadlines.
Speaker 3 (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 2 (11:57):
And I remember 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
(12:18):
tropical island before. And 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 causes is an impoverished is a spiritual,
(12:44):
spiritual impoverishment, and a cultural impoverishment. Now that is the
one that really is the worst. You know, the the
the idea they can not be any God, that they
cannot be God, because that takes away it plays where
(13:05):
Castro or the Communist Party should be in your heart.
One thing that God gives you is hope. God gives
you hope, and Communists don't want you to have hope.
Marxists don't want you to have hope because it is
only when you're hopeless that you will launch the revolution
they desire. They want you to feel completely bereft of
(13:30):
any feeling that your situation will improve, so they will.
They really do go after God for that reason. 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
(13:51):
have music and religion. So I think the empty shells
in the cultural marketplace much more searing to the human
condition to man than the empty shelves of the bodega. Look.
I came to America in nineteen seventy four and I
(14:12):
landed in Queens, New York, and everybody Queens, New York,
the neighborhood where I lived was really a a You
had a multitude of people, mostly of European ancestry, but
people didn't think of themselves that way. They were either Irish,
an Italian, or Polish, or Cuban or Puerto Rican. And
(14:33):
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 that is no longer really the case.
And I think that's a vast improvement from the America
that I arrived in, and that we don't put up
(14:55):
with racial epithets. We don't think they're funny, we don't
think they're part of pol society. And I think that
that is a that has been a very very good
thing that has happened in this country. But now what
we have over the last twenty or at least ten years,
(15:15):
is it so what we did in the last quarter
of the twentieth century was de try to deracialize society,
tried to deracialize ourselves and I think we succeeded with that,
but now we're reracializing. We're going back to thinking that
a person is his race. But there's a word for this.
(15:37):
It's called essentialism. Essentialism means that 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. I come from
(15:57):
wealthy people. I come from poor pep I come from
the lord of the manner. I come from the Serbs.
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 became an adult, and even as
(16:18):
a teenager. If you make better decisions overall than bad decisions,
you're gonna have very good shot in life. But has
nothing to do with DNA, has nothing to do with race.
Any scheme, whether it's charitable or government or educational, that
is based on race, that is based on the idea
(16:38):
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, we only look
at the lessons of what happened in Cuba, what happened
in China, what happened in Cambodia, in order that we
(16:59):
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 breadlines. And he went on
to emphasize Mike that it's not just material poverty, but
(17:26):
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.
And none of their descendants are Cuban. All of the
descendants are here in the United States, and they're all
one fourth Cuban, one half Cuban, one eighth Cuban. They
have disappeared as a Cuban family. This is a very
(01:35):
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. That's a
very good story. But it also means that that has
been lost Cuba. The reason why I talk about this
(01:59):
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, the lawyer who worked on
(02:22):
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. They're
all one quarter Cuban and one half Cuban, and all
of the other people who meet Cuba left and so
(02:44):
Cuba has become this unrecognizable place to me. I mean,
I had never been back. I left fifty years ago,
and I doubt I would go back. My grandfather was
a politician, a a lawyer, and a journalist. He was
an essay writer who was very anti Bautista, fought against
(03:06):
Bautista 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 then he
had a coup detta in nineteen fifty two. My grandfather,
who died in nineteen fifty four, was a man who
(03:28):
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. Batista sent policemen to my house, in which
my grandmother would open the drawers and show them the
(03:49):
boxes of soap, saying, because you can see all I
have here is soap, but inside the boxes of soap
there was ammunition. And then you had my father, who
was antipatist as well and was thrown into prison. My
father taught law at university, and when Castro declared himself
(04:13):
as a communist, Castro had always denied he was a communist. Well,
he was a rebel. My parents knew Castro. My mom
and dad met in law school and they met Castro
in law school. Castro was a lawyer. And when Castro
became declared himself a Communists after the revolution had succeeded,
my father quit his chair position as a law professor
(04:37):
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. And he
was very resolute. He said, well, in a country with
his Communism, there's no law for me to teach here.
So that was it was penalized. But he was not
(04:57):
able to get a proper diet. He was diabetic the
day he died. The equipment that 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
(05:20):
used as it was a very nice place. My aunts
were married there and it was used as a as
it plays to entertain Surviet generals for a time after
they took it away from us. But I think the
the loss that I think I'd like to emphasize is
(05:42):
not just the material possessions. It's the cultural genocide aspect
of things. Communism must always destroy what comes before it.
In the case of Paul pot in Cambodia, he actually
declared the year when he entered Non pen As year one.
(06:03):
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.
Hollywood Road is the street in Hong Kong where all
the antiques are sold, and you would come across a
lot of furniture where people have been painted on furniture
(06:27):
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 on furniture. That's to
what degree communism must exterminate whatever culture precedes it. So
(06:55):
what happened in Cuba is what happened in many other
countries that have had this great tragedy of 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.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
When we come back.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
More from Mike Gonzalez a part of our True Diversity
series brought to us 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
(07:42):
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If 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
(08:11):
Stories and 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 were a jack and a tie. We said goodbye
(08:51):
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. Then we drove over to
(09:13):
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 of
(09:33):
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. And then we got to
the airport and we were all there, all that held
(09:55):
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,
and you ask for a sylum. Don't turn back, don't
(10:18):
look at me, just run as fast as you can
and get on that plane. I don't like to discuss
these things. They're hard, they're hard memories. I don't enjoy
you talking about the way in the least. I arrived
in Spain at the age of twelve, a few months
after the death of my father, and I really realized
(10:42):
that what shells were for and in 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 the cancer of food in sacks of
(11:03):
flour and the shelves of circus. Had I never saw
that in Cuba, never ever. When meat would arrive at
the at the butchers, every every person, eavy adult left
the house to go line up to get whatever and
if you if you were last one to line up,
(11:24):
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. They never produce bread. They
only produce breadlines.
Speaker 3 (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 2 (11:57):
And I remember 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
(12:18):
tropical island before. And 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 causes is an impoverished is a spiritual,
(12:44):
spiritual impoverishment, and a cultural impoverishment. Now that is the
one that really is the worst. You know, the the
the idea they can not be any God, that they
cannot be God, because that takes away it plays where
(13:05):
Castro or the Communist Party should be in your heart.
One thing that God gives you is hope. God gives
you hope, and Communists don't want you to have hope.
Marxists don't want you to have hope because it is
only when you're hopeless that you will launch the revolution
they desire. They want you to feel completely bereft of
(13:30):
any feeling that your situation will improve, so they will.
They really do go after God for that reason. 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
(13:51):
have music and religion. So I think the empty shells
in the cultural marketplace much more searing to the human
condition to man than the empty shelves of the bodega. Look.
I came to America in nineteen seventy four and I
(14:12):
landed in Queens, New York, and everybody Queens, New York,
the neighborhood where I lived was really a a You
had a multitude of people, mostly of European ancestry, but
people didn't think of themselves that way. They were either Irish,
an Italian, or Polish, or Cuban or Puerto Rican. And
(14:33):
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 that is no longer really the case.
And I think that's a vast improvement from the America
that I arrived in, and that we don't put up
(14:55):
with racial epithets. We don't think they're funny, we don't
think they're part of pol society. And I think that
that is a that has been a very very good
thing that has happened in this country. But now what
we have over the last twenty or at least ten years,
(15:15):
is it so what we did in the last quarter
of the twentieth century was de try to deracialize society,
tried to deracialize ourselves and I think we succeeded with that,
but now we're reracializing. We're going back to thinking that
a person is his race. But there's a word for this.
(15:37):
It's called essentialism. Essentialism means that 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. I come from
(15:57):
wealthy people. I come from poor pep I come from
the lord of the manner. I come from the Serbs.
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 became an adult, and even as
(16:18):
a teenager. If you make better decisions overall than bad decisions,
you're gonna have very good shot in life. But has
nothing to do with DNA, has nothing to do with race.
Any scheme, whether it's charitable or government or educational, that
is based on race, that is based on the idea
(16:38):
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, we only look
at the lessons of what happened in Cuba, what happened
in China, what happened in Cambodia, in order that we
(16:59):
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 breadlines. And he went on
to emphasize Mike that it's not just material poverty, but
(17:26):
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
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Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.