A Cuban-American's Reflections: Fidel, The Adolph Hitler of Latin America

 DISCLAIMER: This narrative expands on a post I made immediately after learning of Fidel’s death. This story is very personal, but it needs to be told to expose the truth of a bloody tyrant.

Like many of my fellow Cuban-American exiles living in the United States, I greeted news of Fidel Castro’s death with mixed emotions. At first, I was suspicious and dismissed the breaking news reports. After all, there had been false reports in the past. Still, these reports were different. As the early morning news headlines matured, it became abundantly clear that reports were finally true. It was then that the deeper meaning of this reality sunk in. I watched news feeds which showed Miami’s Little Havana community spilling out into the streets in celebratory fashion with a great sense of shared joy. It was then that I began to reflect on my life and that of my parents who suffered immensely under Fidel’s brutal dictatorship. You see, I am a member of the greater Cuban exile community. It was during my period of reflection that I recalled my youth in Havana. These were memories that would change my life forever.

Cuba’s beaches had eye-opening surprises. I was only five years old when my memories of life in Cuba began to set in for life. My earliest recollections were of life in a cozy neighborhood called Miramar, only minutes from the famed Malecón coastal esplanade along Havana Bay. To this day, I remember the beautiful beaches my parents loved to take my younger brother and me to on weekends. The bright sun always seemed to be blinding as it reflected off the bone white sandy shoreline. Dipping into the cool surf was all the more necessary to escape the oppressive tropical heat. Spiny black sea urchins littered the sands. Walking barefoot became an act that demanded your keen attention. Furthermore, I distinctly remember the public swimming areas having a unique feature unseen in America’s beaches—manmade sea walls that just barely peeked above the not too distant breakers. These barriers concealed a submerged labyrinth of arched concrete pillars with crisscrossing iron bars in-between. The design of these prison-like barriers was meant to prevent patrolling schools of sharks from feasting on beachgoers. I remember my father taking me back to these same beaches around sunset to watch local fishermen haul up dead sharks of all varieties and sizes that somehow managed to lodge and drown themselves in the barrier’s iron grates. Interestingly, Fidel’s brutal regime did nothing to hold back his equally blood-thirsty sharks from devouring the liberty and freedoms of the Cuban population.

Beware the bearded revolutionary peddling false hopes to the masses. I was born in Havana to a Cuban father and a Spanish mother. My father grew up as a child musical prodigy in Havana. His love of classical music and violin, in particular, led him to become a concert violinist who, prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution, traveled the world. His frequent trips included south Florida to enjoy baseball. His worldly travels would eventually lead him to meet my mother in Paris. His immediate family, including his father and brother, were medical doctors with thriving medical practices in Havana. Like many of his contemporaries, he viewed Fidel’s violent revolution and subsequent rise to power with high anxiety. My father often recounted Fidel’s great lie. One that the world would eventually consume as well. You see, he came to power under the auspices of toppling a dictator named Fulgencio Batista and replacing that corrupt regime with “representative democracy.” In truth, Democracy never had a chance. Once in power, he began to systematically dismantle all vestiges of capitalism by taking state ownership of all privately owned property, including domestic and international enterprises. He even publicly declared his Communist affiliation with the Soviet Union. This surprising act not only shocked the very Cuban people that had previously supported his rise to power, but a competing Cold War superpower just 90 miles north of Havana. Many of my father’s closest friends had seen enough and opted to leave Cuba in droves. Many found sanctuaries in Europe, Latin America, and the US. Still, he wrongly hoped that because he was not an overtly political person, more of a musicophile, he could escape the attention of the newly formed Communist Party security apparatus. He just wanted to focus on being an invisible musician in a country he loved and that loved him back. An ominous knock on our door one hot summer night splintered any hopes of political anonymity.

Nothing good happens when state security pays you a surprise visit. In the summer of 1967, our family was visited by a roving band of local thugs belonging to the “G-2, Seguridad del Estado” (State Security). This organization was an internal intelligence gathering agency for the Castro regime that modeled itself on the Stasi, or the East German Secret Police. They entered our home and began to berate my father for not enrolling in the Cuban Communist Party. They brought with them attendance rolls from a recent meeting and my father’s name was conspicuously missing. Being a poor liar, my father admitted that he had no interest in becoming politically active within the Communist Party and insisted that all he wanted to do for his country was play the violin and entertain the Cuban masses as a loyal comrade. This admission did not sit well with the “G-2” visitors and they warned him to carefully reconsider before their next visit. Upon their departure, my father instinctively realized that his days of freedom were somehow coming to a close. He then pleaded with my mother to seek the help of the Spanish Consulate and begin filing for formal departure from Cuba. Being the children of a Cuban father and Spanish mother meant that my brother and I had access to dual citizenship status. My mother applied for us to obtain Spanish visas. Sadly, my father’s intuition was so accurate. Several days after that ominous meeting, the same “G-2” thugs returned to our home, but this time they were in no mood to hear my father’s decision. They entered forcefully and arrested my father on the spot for “crimes against the state.” He was then abruptly whisked away scarring our family. Sobbing uncontrollably, my mother’s zeal for our departure from Cuba took on a more hurried pace.

You can tell a lot about Fidel’s brutal regime by the way it treated its dissenters. Months went by with our family getting no word on where my father was taken to. We later learned that he was taken to one of Fidel’s infamous forced labor camps (campos) euphemistically called “Military Units in Aid of Production.” These campos were better known by the Spanish acronym UMAP. Neither military nor designed to aid in any production whatsoever, these were internment camps where the Castro regime sent its undesirables. Those unlucky to become internees were subjected to deplorable conditions including daily beatings, malnourishment, “re-education” training, and for many, death by firing squads. The magnitude of the thousands he killed under his directives is the most under-reported story in the history of journalism. My father’s once elite social status worked against him. When his captors learned of his education, his musical talent, and skill playing the violin, they decided to torture him even more severely. They even went so far as to crush the bones in his hands so he could never play the violin again. Not surprisingly, the ire of the “G-2” was not solely focused on my father. I began to notice that as days went by without our father being around to protect us, most of our furnishings started disappearing. Bewildered, one day, I asked my mother where our couch, our dining room table, and even our television had gone. Fearing that my brother and I as young children would divulge intimate details of our family to our play friends (whose parents belonged to the Communist Party) she lied and told us that everything was broken and sent away for much-needed repairs. Even at our young age, we sensed that her answer was untruthful. After all, everything seemed in working order the week before and it was odd that everything would suddenly break all at once. Still, her fear based tactic of suppressing secretive reporting to the local Communist Party worked. She later told me that our neighbors seemed oblivious to the goings on inside our home. My mother pressed on with our departure from Cuba to Madrid.

Cuba provided me the earliest opportunity to learn the skill of listening with my eyes. My mother eventually succeeded in obtaining exit visas and one-way airline tickets to Spain, but the process wiped out our parent’s life savings. More precisely, “G-2’s” determination to suppress dissent did not stop with just stealing our physical possessions or detaining my father at a forced labor camp. No, they systematically drained all of my parents’ bank accounts—everything we owned became stolen property of the state. I recall the days prior to my first flight ever, seeing my mother nervously pacing our now empty home. Her footsteps echoed loudly in that empty shell of a home. Long gone were the days when we used to escape the heat of Havana at our favorite beaches. My brother and I, being very young children with boundless energy, improvised and played games of tag in our home. We discovered that running inside was easier when furniture isn’t around to trip you. Then, to our surprise, our father showed up at the front door. Still, his appearance revealed the deep impact of his secretive absence. Long gone from my father’s face was hope. He seemed to be suffocating from despair. Clearly, he had survived great physical abuse. Besides being visibly thinner, his lifeless eyes sunk deeply into the two dark tunnels in his face. He could barely use his hands and arms. Worse still, it was the first time in my life that I witnessed my father weep uncontrollably. He was not simply crying, rather weeping. Trust me, the difference is more than semantic. Latin America places a premium on masculine pride—machismo. Latino men are not supposed to cry. My father was no longer macho. He was human in all its frailty. Too human. Seeing my parents barely holding each other up in mutual spasms of tears was a lot for me to process as a young boy. Witnessing their sorrow triggered a sympathetic gush of tears from my own face. No words were needed. Fidel’s state apparatus had succeeded in breaking my father’s soul. His once vibrant spirit had been extinguished. Apparently, they even robbed him of his masculinity. I truly believed that his facial muscles were physically incapable of forming a smile. That image would haunt me for the rest of my life. I will forever associate that look with the ideology of Communism. The next time I saw a similar expression was in combat, in Iraq. This time on the faces of our soldiers after they endured close combat with insurgents and revealed in their collective sorrow of witnessing the death of their teammates. Our next move was to leave this hopeless country.

There are probably very few days in one’s life where you can pinpoint a truly transformative moment. For me, my first transformative moment occurred the day our father returned home from his camp of horrors. During their surprising reunion, my mother recounted to my father how the “G-2” had taken everything. Then, she saved her worst news for last. As my father processed the gravity of their losses she brought up his most prized possession—an 18th-century era violin. My mother tried hiding it in our home, but it was eventually discovered and confiscated by Fidel’s henchmen. Worse still, illustrative of the ignorance of thugs put into positions of abusive power after the revolution, the violin’s confiscators used my father’s prized instrument as a make-shift baseball bat to hit one of my brother’s play balls across our home. By confiscating his violin, the state ensured that my father’s source of income would be cut off. My father’s anguish reached even deeper lows. He was inconsolable. Noticing that my brother and I were crying from seeing their parents’ cry, my father walked over, grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me right in the eyes and then said the words that I will never forget. Locking eyes, both of us in tears, he said, “?Me quieres hacer sentir orgulloso? Cuando crezca yo quiero que mates los comunistas!” (Want to make me proud? I want you to kill Communists when you grow up!) I was only five at the time. He could not have been more serious. Sure, he was emotionally distraught, but humans communicate verbally as well as non-verbally, his eyes told a novel. Little did I know then that these words would later frame my life.

I remember the day we bailed out from this sinking ship called Cuba. Funny, if you travel in America today, one of the most erratic behaviors to experience is the hustle and bustle of airline passengers as they fight the pointless boarding line queues and their subsequent struggle to squeeze too many oversized carry-on bags into ever-shrinking overhead bins. The day we left Cuba, baggage limits were not an issue. We were model travelers by today’s standards. In fact, as we prepared to board the Iberia airlines plane to Madrid, our family of four only had one small carry-on bag. Imagine that, one bag for a family of four—how efficient is that? Suffering one last act of state-sponsored humiliation, Cuban authorities at the bottom of the plane’s mobile stairway, stopped my parents, checked their exit visas and ordered them to remove and turn over their wedding bands and my mother’s earrings. Even deeply personal jewelry meant nothing in Communist Cuba. They robbed my parents of their matrimony under God. We literally flew out of Fidel’s Communist state with nothing but the clothes on our backs.  

In life, wedding vows often get put to the highest of tests. Given the sad state of my father’s physical and psychological well-being, the recovery of our family fell square on the shoulders of my mother. After all, it was my mother that successfully obtained exit visas. It was her birthplace that would become our temporary sanctuary. It was her family that we would end up leaning on to rebuild our lives, our hopes, and our aspirations. We ended up spending two years living in Madrid. In that time my father healed. Slowly, but with a determined sense of purpose, my family rebuilt their nest egg. My father even scrounged enough money to buy a new violin and was successfully integrated into Spain’s classical music circles. For my brother and me, our biggest challenge was ridding our Spanish Latin American accents and adopting convincing Castilian Spanish accents. Behind the scenes, the lure of the world’s great land of promise grew stronger. Of my father’s fellow Cuban musical protégés, many that left Cuba immediately after the 1959 revolution had successfully transplanted themselves in New York City in a small, but successful Cuban musical community. In 1969, we left Spain for the greener pastures of the Big Apple.

Growing up in Spanish Harlem became another transformative moment in my life. Our early years in New York City were not without significant challenges. First, we all had to overcome the huge language barrier. Surprisingly, matriculating as a second grader in PS 165 somehow allowed me to quickly learn English. We moved often. From New York City to Kansas City, then back to Spanish Harlem again. My father, with us in tow, was nomadic in his quest for jobs in the symphony industry. At first, we lived as tenants in someone’s apartment. A family of four sharing one room. Secondly, it was the early seventies that witnessed my father retaking the reins as the patriarch of our family. He successfully integrated into the tristate symphonies. After all, classical music requires no Spanish-to-English translation or vice versa. Amazingly, my father was able to buy another 18th-century violin and soon our quality of life slowly improved. Being a young Cuban emigre in Spanish Harlem meant resisting the gravitational pull of street crime and drug culture. Both were thriving during the tenures of Mayors’ Abe Beame and Ed Koch. That being said, my father would have none of that. As we eked out a living, my parents always instilled in me an appreciation for education. To them, education was the ladder for success in America. The ladder to the American dream had educational degrees as its rungs. So, while my friends in the barrio focused on selling drugs, muggings, and petty larceny, my parents adopted a role as helicopter parents, ensuring my brother and I never had a chance of losing our educational azimuth. In time we assimilated nicely. We stopped thinking in Spanish and lost all traces of former Spanish accents. We were almost fully integrated into American society and culture, with the exception of one minor formality.

For me, citizenship was the gold ring on the carousel of life in the United States. My family followed the rule of law, waited the appropriate time and applied for full citizenship. In 1976, the year of our nation’s bicentennial and “Operation Sail” along the Hudson River, we became naturalized citizens—one of the proudest moments in my life! Despite having overcome huge obstacles to become fully integrated citizens in this great country of ours, my father never truly regained his sense of self-identity. He was perpetually bothered by the fact that his country of birth would forever consider him an enemy of the state. To magnify the gravity of deep political divisions as a result of Fidel’s revolution, both his father and brother refused to ever talk to him again. My father would spend the rest of his days on Earth with zero contact with his blood kin. Castro’s communism even managed to strip my father of DNA linkages to his family. Challenges on many fronts notwithstanding, my parents continued to insist that we remain on track to apply to and attend quality universities. As the days waned on the decade of the seventies, it was time for me to make big boy decisions on life.

My senior year in high school coincided with the tail end of President Carter’s administration. America was at a low point in its arc of history and with diminishing influence around the globe. In 1979, the regime of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahvli, was toppled. America found itself humiliated on the global stage by ragtag Iranian Revolutionaries taking 52 of our diplomats and citizens hostage. It was during this turbulent period that I had applied for a US Naval Academy appointment through my local State Representative, Harrison A. Williams Jr. Disappointedly, I would later be told that my packet was rejected as a result of an FBI sting operation called Abscam. Our Congressman was later convicted of bribery. All of Representative Williams’ military academy nominations and endorsements from applicants in our Congressional District were invalidated by the service academy review boards. Thankfully, I had applied to backup schools. This action turned out to be a life saver. Interestingly, this tangential aspect of my life, the one about having a crooked member of Congress intersecting my life’s ambitions, was glamorized in the 2014 Hollywood movie, American Hustle.

I was now a 17-year-old, a high school senior with an education decision dilemma. So, in the fall of 1979, given the 444 days-long Iranian hostage crisis on full display on Nightline every night, I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as marine rifleman. Joining the military under the age of eighteen meant that I needed my parent’s signed permission. This desperate act, yet again, led to another of my life’s transformative moments.

Never, ever, bully your parents. You would think that this tenet would be easy to follow. Apparently, I pushed my boundaries. My parents became aware of my Naval Academy packet rejection, but I never told them about my decision to join the military. A marine recruiter soon found his way to my house to obtain my parent’s signature on my enlistment contract. Needless to say, the meeting between my parents and the recruiter did not go well. After all, they insisted that I go to college according to their theory on earning the American dream mentioned earlier. My father refused to sign. This awkward impasse led to a frank discussion I have ever had with my father. I found myself having to muscle him. For the second time in my life, my father cried before me. Flabbergasted, my father asked me why I was doing this. My answer would haunt him. I basically argued that I wanted to repay our debt to this great nation for taking us in and for allowing us to thrive in the aftermath of what seemed impossible, recovery from political exile. Volunteering to serve in the military of my newly adopted country made sense to me. I wanted to defend the great words of our Constitution with my very life. Seeing no traction in his willingness to sign my contract, I applied the nuclear option. I then recalled my conversation years earlier. 12 years earlier to be exact. I told him that I wanted to make him proud by being a member of a profession that could someday “kill communists!” It crushed him as he too remembered that conversation. Reluctantly, he signed the contract!

As luck would have it, I would serve honorably in the Marines and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Norwich University—the first generation of Cuban émigrés in my family to do so. Further, my initial enlistment led to an Officer Candidate School appointment in the US Army and a successful military career as an infantry officer and Army planner that lasted 35 years ‘till my retirement in 2015. The military was good to me. As émigré, I rose in rank from private to full colonel. Where else, but in America is this feat even possible? Furthermore, military service exposed me to combat, including a deployment in Operation Desert Storm, and later in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. Despite my long years of military service, I lament the fact that I never “killed communists,” but I did lead infantrymen in killing other evil doers at the behest of our nation’s executive branch. Sadly, in 2007, my father passed away from cancer while I led an infantry battalion in counterinsurgency combat in Iraq. He never lived to rejoice in hearing the news of Fidel’s death. Despite his admirable rise from the ashes of Communism, he never fully recovered from the emotional trauma of Fidel’s regime. Both my brother and I earned college degrees, even multiple Masters Degrees. Paying it forward, I ensured my children appreciated the same education ethos I benefitted from. Two of my children have attended and obtained engineering degrees from our nation’s top schools, including MIT and Johns Hopkins. Indeed, I achieved the American Dream through education, just as my parents had predicted all along.

So, as I watch members of my extended Cuban-American community in Little Havana celebrate the death of a brutal dictator, I reflect on the misery he inflicted on my family and countless others who suffered worse depravities. Today, I find it amusing how our politicos are at odds on labeling Fidel’s legacy. For me, his legacy is crystal clear, Fidel Castro, who shared and orbit with other malevolent dictators around the globe, will forever be the Adolph Hitler of Latin America. Nothing less. I only wish that with Fidel’s death the hard working people of Cuba can find hope in someday soon joining the world in freedom and liberty too long denied. Now, I await news of Raul’s death!