My Father Was Friends with Castro...Until He Wasn't

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Uses Directed. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Today we meet Mike Gonzalez. He was born in Cuba. Here's his family story. I have a photo of my great-grandparents in my study taken in 1921 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 1511. My great-grandfather was elected to the first Havana City Council in 1905 after the war with Spain and the U.S. intervention and none of their descendants are Cuban. None of their, 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 Cuban establishment family that has given their offspring to the United States and they're all happy Americans.

In a way that is 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 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 along 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 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.

They're all like Cameron Diaz. They're all one-quarter Cuban and one-half Cuban and all of the other people who made Cuba left. And so Cuba has become this unrecognizable place to me. I mean I'd never been back.

I left 50 years ago and I doubt I'll ever go back. My grandfather was a politician, a lawyer, and a journalist. He was an essay writer who was very anti-Bautista, fought against Batista for decades. Batista was a fixture of Cuban politics from the 1930s to 1958.

Batista was elected president, freely elected in 1940, and then he had a coup d'etat in 1952. My grandfather who died in 1954 was a man who fought against him, 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 have here is soap, but inside those boxes of soap there was this ammunition. And then you had my father who was anti-Bautista as well and was thrown into prison. My father taught law at university and when Castro declared himself as a communist, Castro had always denied that he was a communist while 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 communist after the revolution had succeeded, my father quit his chair position as a law professor at the university and they sent armed 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 this communism there's no law for me to teach here.

So that was it. He was penalized, but he was not able to get the proper diet. He was diabetic. The other day he died, the equipment that might have saved his life was being used on a Soviet officer by the hospital. The hospital only had one machine. You know, I was young then.

I was 11 years old. We had a farm that the government took away and it was used as a very nice place. My aunts were married there and it was used as a place to entertain Soviet generals for a time after they took it away from us. But I think the 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 what comes before it.

In the case of Pol Pot in Cambodia, he actually declared the year when he entered Phnom Penh 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, I used to go and shop in Hollywood Road.

It's a 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 and dressers. And the faces in many of these pieces of furniture have been erased. And the reason for that is that the Red Guard entered into 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 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. 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 here on Our American Stories. Here at 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.

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Get started risk-free at Greenlight.com slash I heart. And we continue with our American stories and with Mike Gonzalez's story. As a kid, Mike was fortunate to escape communist Cuba.

He now brings us back to his day of escape. My 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 practiced verbal conjugations with me, and said goodbye to her never to see her again. Then we drove over 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 mother and her parents were crying. To me, it was the happiest day of my life. And it was the happiest day of my life, well, barring 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 there was such consternation. And then we got to the airport, and we were all there, all 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. And you ask for asylum. Don't turn back. Don't 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 memories.

I don't enjoy talking about them in the least. I arrived in Spain at the age of 12, a few months after the death of my father. And I really realized then what shells were for. And in stores, I sold shells with actual merchandise. I had never, ever seen that.

No, I lied. I had seen it once before in Cuba in a photo my father showed me. And I was shocked to see cans of food in sacks of flour in the shells of the circus. I never saw that in Cuba.

Never, ever. When meat would arrive at the butchers, every person, every adult left the house to go line up to get whatever. And if you were the last one to line up, then you could only get ground beef and have to eat picadillo because everything else was gone. It depends where you were in line. There were lines everywhere. The only thing communists produce, they never produce bread.

They only produce bread lines. I remember my mother, when we arrived in Spain and were working on, by the way, let's not forget that Spain at this time in 1972 is itself a poor country. And yet it was like pure heaven compared to Cuba. 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 I hold it?

And he lets me hold it. And my mother was crying because it was a pineapple. And it had been produced in Cuba, obviously, because Cuba was a 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 12. So that gives you some idea of the kind of poverty that communism produces. But it's again, the real impoverishment that communism causes is a spiritual impoverishment and a cultural impoverishment.

That is the one that really is the worst. The idea that it can not be any God, that it cannot be God because that takes away a place where 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's only when you're hopeless that you will launch the revolution they desire.

They want you to feel completely bereft of any feeling that your situation will improve. So 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 only thing you will know for sure is that they have music and religion.

So I think the empty shelves 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 1974 and I landed in Queens, New York. And everybody, Queens, New York, the neighborhood where I lived, was really a, you had a multitude of people, mostly of European ancestry, but people didn't think of themselves that way. They were either Irish, and Italian, or Polish, or Cuban, or 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. 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 they're funny.

We don't think they're part of polite society. And I think that that has been a very, very good thing that has happened in this country. But now what we have over the last 20 years, at least 10 years, is what we did in the last quarter of the 20th century was try to de-racialize society, try to de-racialize ourselves.

And I think we succeeded with that. But now we're re-racializing. 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 origin you are, or I come from very different ancestors. I come from ancestors who were Cuban.

I come from ancestors who were Spanish. I come from wealthy people. I come from poor people. I come from the Lord of the manor.

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 I became an adult, and even as a teenager. If you make better decisions overall than bad decisions, you're going to have a good shot in life. But it 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 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 can save what we have here in the land of the free. And you've been listening to Mike Gonzalez share with you his story. Communists don't produce bread.

They produce bread lines. 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 your heart, he said. God gives you hope. Communists don't want you to feel hope.

Mike Gonzalez's story, the story of so many refugees from Cuba, Eastern Bloc countries, and countries around the world, here on Our American Stories. This message comes from Greenlight. Ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to earn, save, spend wisely, and invest with your guardrails in place. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on what your kids are spending with real-time notifications. Join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits together on Greenlight. Get started risk-free at greenlight.com slash iHeart. is available for select mobile devices.

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