March 5, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Mike Gonzalez tells this story of his family escaping the clutches of Castro's communist dictatorship.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
This is Lee Habib, but this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Today we meet Mike Gonzales. He was born in Cuba.
Here's his family's story.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I have 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
(00:58):
oh five after the war with Spain and the US intervention.
And none of their descendants are Cuban. None of 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
(01:20):
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. That's
a very good story, but it also means that that
that has been lost Cuba. The reason why I talk
(01:44):
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 beauty for building, you can be
assured that the architect who drew the plans, the lawyer
(02:07):
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.
They're all one quarter Cuban and one half Cuban, and
all of the other people who meet Cuba left, and
(02:29):
so 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 lawyer, and a journalist. He was an
essay writer who was very anti Bautista, fought against Baptista
(02:53):
for decades. Batista was a fixture of human politics from
the nineteen thirties to nineteen fifty eight. Batista 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 fought
(03:14):
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
boxes of soap, saying, because you can see, all I
(03:37):
have here is soap, but inside those boxes of soap
there was this ammunition. And then you had my father,
who was Antipautista as well and was thrown into prison.
My father taught law at university, and when Castro declared
(03:58):
himself as a communist, Astro had always denied that 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
(04:21):
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.
And he was very resolute. He said, well, in a
country with his Communists and there's no law for me
to teach here. So that was it was penalized. But
(04:42):
he was not able to get a proper diet. He
was diabetic. The other 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
(05:03):
took away and he was used as it was a
very nice place. My aunts were married there and it
was used as a as it plays to entertain sory
generals for a time after they took it away from us.
But I think the the loss that I think I'd
(05:25):
like to emphasize is 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
(05:46):
non penn 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. Hollywood Road is the
street in Hong Kong where all the antiques are sold,
(06:07):
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
(06:28):
of people, even 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 of communism. That's what can happen here.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And what a story you're hearing from Mike Gonzales. 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
here on our American stories. Here are to our American stories.
(07:32):
We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told that we can't do it without you.
Our 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
(07:53):
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 with Mike Gonzalez's story. As a kid,
(08:14):
Mike was fortunate to escape Communist Cuba. He now brings
us back to his day of escape.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
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 wore a jack and a tie. We said goodbye
(08:45):
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 conjugations with me. Say goodbye to her never to
see her again. Then we drove over to see my
(09:06):
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 mother and her parents were crying. To me,
was the happiest day of my life, and it was
(09:28):
the happiest day of my life. Well borray 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 up in a room,
(09:50):
and my mother whispered in my ear when we started
walking towards the plane. If the authorities called me back,
and you and your sister, you see, 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 silo. Don't turn back, don't
(10:11):
look at me, just run as fast as you can
and get on that plane. I don't like to discuss
these things there. They're hard, they're hard memories. I don't
enjoy you talking to them, by 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
(10:34):
really realized that what shells were for and the stories
are sold 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 cancer of food in
(10:56):
sacks of flower. Then the shells of stircus I hadn't
I never see in Cuba, never ever. When meat would
arrive at the at the butcher's, every person, every adult
left the house to go line up to get whatever
and if you if you were the last one to
line up, then you could only get ground beef and
(11:19):
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 (11:33):
I remember 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 (11:50):
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
(12:11):
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,
(12:37):
spiritual impoverishment and a cultural impoverishment. Now that is the
one that really is the worst. You know, the the
the the idea they can not be any God, that
they cannot be God because because that takes away it
(12:57):
plays for Castro or the communist part. It 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
(13:22):
bereft of 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. One thing we do
know about human nature is that we all have religion.
You can arrive at an unknown island today and the
(13:42):
only thing you will know for sure is that they
have music and religion. So I think the empty shells
in the cultural marketplace are 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
(14:05):
landed in Queens, New York, and everybody Queen's New York.
The 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, a Polish, or a Cuban of
Puerto Rican. And by the way, there was a name,
(14:29):
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 with racial epithets. We don't think
(14:50):
they're funny, we don't think they're part of polite society.
And I think that that is a that has been
a very, very good the thing that has happened in
this country. But now what we have over the last
twenty or at least ten years is it's so what
we did in the last quarter of the twentieth century
(15:15):
was de tried 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. It's called essentialism. Essentialism
means that we are our race, you represent whatever national
(15:38):
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 wealthy people, I
come from poor people. I come from the Lord of
the manner. I come from the Serbs, and I am
(15:59):
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 a teenager. If
you make better decisions overall than bad decisions, you're gonna
have a good shot in life. But has nothing to
(16:21):
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 that people
are ambassadors and spokesmen for their race, is going to
fail and fail miserably because it is not true. We
(16:43):
have to save America from this. We only look at
the lessons of what happened in Cuba, what happened in China,
would happen in Cambodia, in order that we can save
what we have here, the land of the Free.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
And you've been listening to Mike Gonzales share with you
his story. Communists don't produce bread, they produce breadlines, and
he went on to emphasize Mike that it's not just
material poverty, but worse is the spiritual poverty that communism demands.
There can't be God because Castro has to be in
(17:18):
your heart. He said. God gives you hope. Communists don't
want you to feel hope. Mike Gonzalez's story, the story
has so many refugees from Cuba, Eastern Bloc countries, and
countries around the world. Here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, but this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Today we meet Mike Gonzales. He was born in Cuba.
Here's his family's story.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I have 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
(00:58):
oh five after the war with Spain and the US intervention.
And none of their descendants are Cuban. None of 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
(01:20):
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. That's
a very good story, but it also means that that
that has been lost Cuba. The reason why I talk
(01:44):
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 beauty for building, you can be
assured that the architect who drew the plans, the lawyer
(02:07):
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.
They're all one quarter Cuban and one half Cuban, and
all of the other people who meet Cuba left, and
(02:29):
so 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 lawyer, and a journalist. He was an
essay writer who was very anti Bautista, fought against Baptista
(02:53):
for decades. Batista was a fixture of human politics from
the nineteen thirties to nineteen fifty eight. Batista 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 fought
(03:14):
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
boxes of soap, saying, because you can see, all I
(03:37):
have here is soap, but inside those boxes of soap
there was this ammunition. And then you had my father,
who was Antipautista as well and was thrown into prison.
My father taught law at university, and when Castro declared
(03:58):
himself as a communist, Astro had always denied that 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
(04:21):
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.
And he was very resolute. He said, well, in a
country with his Communists and there's no law for me
to teach here. So that was it was penalized. But
(04:42):
he was not able to get a proper diet. He
was diabetic. The other 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
(05:03):
took away and he was used as it was a
very nice place. My aunts were married there and it
was used as a as it plays to entertain sory
generals for a time after they took it away from us.
But I think the the loss that I think I'd
(05:25):
like to emphasize is 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
(05:46):
non penn 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. Hollywood Road is the
street in Hong Kong where all the antiques are sold,
(06:07):
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
(06:28):
of people, even 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 of communism. That's what can happen here.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And what a story you're hearing from Mike Gonzales. 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
here on our American stories. Here are to our American stories.
(07:32):
We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told that we can't do it without you.
Our 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
(07:53):
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 with Mike Gonzalez's story. As a kid,
(08:14):
Mike was fortunate to escape Communist Cuba. He now brings
us back to his day of escape.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
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 wore a jack and a tie. We said goodbye
(08:45):
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 conjugations with me. Say goodbye to her never to
see her again. Then we drove over to see my
(09:06):
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 mother and her parents were crying. To me,
was the happiest day of my life, and it was
(09:28):
the happiest day of my life. Well borray 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 up in a room,
(09:50):
and my mother whispered in my ear when we started
walking towards the plane. If the authorities called me back,
and you and your sister, you see, 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 silo. Don't turn back, don't
(10:11):
look at me, just run as fast as you can
and get on that plane. I don't like to discuss
these things there. They're hard, they're hard memories. I don't
enjoy you talking to them, by 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
(10:34):
really realized that what shells were for and the stories
are sold 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 cancer of food in
(10:56):
sacks of flower. Then the shells of stircus I hadn't
I never see in Cuba, never ever. When meat would
arrive at the at the butcher's, every person, every adult
left the house to go line up to get whatever
and if you if you were the last one to
line up, then you could only get ground beef and
(11:19):
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 (11:33):
I remember 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 (11:50):
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
(12:11):
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,
(12:37):
spiritual impoverishment and a cultural impoverishment. Now that is the
one that really is the worst. You know, the the
the the idea they can not be any God, that
they cannot be God because because that takes away it
(12:57):
plays for Castro or the communist part. It 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
(13:22):
bereft of 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. One thing we do
know about human nature is that we all have religion.
You can arrive at an unknown island today and the
(13:42):
only thing you will know for sure is that they
have music and religion. So I think the empty shells
in the cultural marketplace are 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
(14:05):
landed in Queens, New York, and everybody Queen's New York.
The 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, a Polish, or a Cuban of
Puerto Rican. And by the way, there was a name,
(14:29):
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 with racial epithets. We don't think
(14:50):
they're funny, we don't think they're part of polite society.
And I think that that is a that has been
a very, very good the thing that has happened in
this country. But now what we have over the last
twenty or at least ten years is it's so what
we did in the last quarter of the twentieth century
(15:15):
was de tried 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. It's called essentialism. Essentialism
means that we are our race, you represent whatever national
(15:38):
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 wealthy people, I
come from poor people. I come from the Lord of
the manner. I come from the Serbs, and I am
(15:59):
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 a teenager. If
you make better decisions overall than bad decisions, you're gonna
have a good shot in life. But has nothing to
(16:21):
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 that people
are ambassadors and spokesmen for their race, is going to
fail and fail miserably because it is not true. We
(16:43):
have to save America from this. We only look at
the lessons of what happened in Cuba, what happened in China,
would happen in Cambodia, in order that we can save
what we have here, the land of the Free.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
And you've been listening to Mike Gonzales share with you
his story. Communists don't produce bread, they produce breadlines, and
he went on to emphasize Mike that it's not just
material poverty, but worse is the spiritual poverty that communism demands.
There can't be God because Castro has to be in
(17:18):
your heart. He said. God gives you hope. Communists don't
want you to feel hope. Mike Gonzalez's story, the story
has so many refugees from Cuba, Eastern Bloc countries, and
countries around the world. Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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