The American people have so much to be thankful for even today as we struggle with the manufactured economic collapses and assaults on our own freedom. We still retain much more freedom than most across the globe, and America appears as Heaven on Earth to those opponents of communism trying to stay alive in Cuba today.

Americans should consider what might have been had not so many come to Her aid as the Colonists fought the War of Independence. So often, in their own arrogance, too many fail to understand “There but for the Grace of God go I” as they flippantly say, “Let the Cubans fight for their freedom like we did.” Like we did? As if we didn’t have some critical points where outside help saved the day.

I wish things were different in D.C. and we had a more competent Chiefs of Staff and Commander-in-Chief. Biden and whoever is behind his chair shouldn’t have a hand in Cuba at all. But, from my own perspective, even though Trump said all the right things in 2017, as they relate to Cuba, I’m not too confident that his administration would have handled this situation properly, since he couldn’t even get some of his military command to follow lawful and direct orders on more than one occasion; this speaks to greater troubles in America that would make two or three separate articles.

“If you have a chance, go to the Freedom Tower in Miami, stop and listen. You can still hear the sounds of those broken promises. It is the sound of waves in the ocean, carrying families clinging to pieces of wood, families with children who can’t swim but willing to risk everything to reach this blessed land. It is the sound of tears hitting the paper of an application to become an American citizen.” ~ Maximo Alvarez, speaking during the GOP 2020 convention

Cubans took to the streets exploding in protest by the thousands in San Antonio de los Banos and Havanna and all points beyond on July 11th 2021 demanding their freedom from the communist regime created by Fidel and Raul Castro that has ruled Cuba with an iron fist for sixty-two years, and it holds some bit of sweet irony, since the Castro’s revolution that ended in more tyranny began on July 26th 1953, continuing until Fidel finally ousted President Fulgencio Batista on the very last day of 1958. These Cuban patriots are risking it all much like our Colonial ancestors did when they had finally had enough, as Cuba experiences the worse economic crisis it has seen in decades, and the world watches hundreds of people arrested, many shot and many more simply disappeared, while all eyes are on America for any indication of help to be forthcoming for the Cuban people in their time of need.

Maximo recounted his understanding even as a thirteen year old of the broken promises of Castro, as he and his family were able to flee Cuba in 1961. As he spoke, he drew parallels to Castro’s communists and what he saw in the promises of the Democratic Party, which makes it of some great importance for all of us to acknowledge the current reprehensible horror of what is now Cuba, as we hear many Cuban woman crying in stark manner, “The people are dying of hunger. Our children are dying of hunger. We want freedom.”

Maximo Alvarez’s terrible observation that he delivered for America’s consideration in 2020 explains Cuba’s current situation and the lies one endures under any communist regime:

“Free education, free healthcare, defund the police, trust a socialist state more than your family and community. They don’t sound radical to my ears. They sound familiar.

When I watch the news in Seattle, Chicago, Portland and other cities, when I see the history being rewritten, when I hear the promises, I hear echoes of a former life I never wanted to hear again. I see shadows I thought I had outrun.”

As American flags are unfurled all across the island nation, many well familiar with Cuba’s history are calling this the largest demonstration they have witnessed since 1959, and that’s really saying something, as the world sees Cubans in Santiago, Artemisa, Santa Clara, Guira de Melena, Matanzas, Colon and Cardenas, some twenty-five different locations all told, standing up in the face of their tyrants, because they feel as if they have nothing left to lose, bringing out la Virgen de la Caridad, the Patroness of Cuba, in the town of Bejucal to the people’s cry of “Libertad! Libertad! Libertad.”

RELATED: ‘Biden’ Admin to Desperate Cubans: “You Are Not Welcome Here”

Demonstrators are seen in numerous videos on Sunday [July 11th] passionately crying out, “Freedom”, “Down with Communism” and “We are not afraid”. The crowds were also shouting ‘Patria y Vida’ [Homeland and Life], that is a reference to a popular song released by a Cuban band that was taken up as a message of rebellion by Cuba’s freedom fighters; the song is a social commentary spoof of Che Guevara’s ‘Homeland or Death’ speech delivered in 1964 to the United Nations, and its lyrics are representative of the Cuban people’s cry for freedom.

On July 11th, after Julie Chung, acting assistant for the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, tweeted – “Peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages. We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.” – Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) demanded that the Biden regime essentially needs to stop disingenuously misrepresenting the situation in Cuba, and he retweeted her message along with:

“No, they’re chanting LIBERTAD. Stop playing cover for the communists and support the Cuban people. My God. Why is that so hard for you.”

A retired U.S. diplomat born in Cuba, Alberto Miguel Fernandez exclaimed in his tweet:

“What a dull, lifeless dumb tweet by #Biden@StateDept official. People in Cuba aren’t calling for COVID shots or medicine. They are calling for Freedom.”

In his recent article, Humberto Fontova, an American citizen born in Havanna, Cuba in 1954 and arriving in the U.S. in 1961, details the current violent attacks from Cuba’s State Police and the military, as he further notes they are unarmed, exposed and in great need of armaments:

“‘The police are killing the Cuban people,’ said Darwin V. Martinez … ‘Here, pinga! Here!’ yelled one of the protesters to the communist police, hitting his chest. ‘Shoot me HERE!’ … ‘I have never heard so many shots in my life,’ said a Cuban identified as Black Sheep … .”

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) recently wrote:

“The Cuban regime’s military police are shooting unarmed Cuban protestors fighting for freedom. 60 years of communism, cruelty, & oppression cannot last any longer! We are imploring the USA to take action as we peacefully demonstrate on the streets of Miami.”

And the protests by the Cuban Americans in Miami were indeed peaceful, if exuberant, frenzied and excited and jubilant, as many spoke in Miami and Tampa and all across Florida. One protestor, eighty-two year old Hermin Soler, who fought against Castro and spent ten years as a political prisoner in Cuba, suggested that the Cubans were finally emerging from the “dream of the revolution” as they fight the realities of the communist regime, and he asked Miami’s people to encourage the Cuban people in their uprising, by letting them know that they are not alone in their struggle.

Florida Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nunez (R) stated:

“The images we are seeing from across the island are an outcry as shortages of basic necessities have become commonplace. As a Cuban-American, I stand in solidarity with the freedom-seeking people of Cuba calling for the end of the communist dictatorship. The Castro’s continued repression won’t keep the Cuban people from peacefully demanding their God-given rights. As Cubans risk everything in protest, Florida will continue to support our Cuban brothers and sisters who are fighting for freedom, democracy, and human rights.”

We hear calls for U.S. intervention alongside calls for U.S. restraint in the matter, and virtually no call for anything from the Democratic Party socialists and communists, such as Senator Bernie Sanders. And although a great argument could be made for invading Cuba and freeing its people, since America is actually responsible for its creation as a sovereign nation in 1908, it’s an inescapable matter that the freedom loving people of this nation, including two million Cuban Americans, who might seek an intervention, would be asking Joe Biden, the man who would be dictator of the U.S., to carry out so important a mission. The last thing Cuba needs today is Joe Biden’s communist advocacy involved in any of their affairs, since his involvement would most certainly help Cuba’s dictator, “President” Miguel Diaz-Canel and do great harm to the cause of freedom and liberty for the poverty stricken ordinary Cubans in the streets.

I suppose the question of the day is: Are there any Americans today who would put their lives on the line to see the Cuban people live free once more? Many expatriates have built nice, comfortable free lives here in America, complete with homes, families and businesses. How many are willing to drop what they are doing and rush to aid the people of Cuba, many who are their own relatives left behind?

The men who joined Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in 1898 to fight the Spanish in Cuba were from all walks of American society, found in schools like Harvard and Yale, on the plains of Texas and the Four Territories and even the Indian Territory and from New Mexico and Arizona to New York and Massachusetts and all points of the compass. They were virile, intelligent, hard, hot-blooded men who were, in many cases, adventurers in the old sense of the word, many of whom had already escaped death on many separate occasions with lives that would sell many books for the retelling.

How many men of this caliber remain in the Free World today, or America for that matter?

To that note, from approximately 4:30 PM into the late evening on July 12th, a group of approximately ten men under the direction of Santiago Rivero, a local personality in Miami, made preparations acquiring boats and supplies for a humanitarian relief effort to sail for Cuba from Pelican Bay Harbor, a ten hour voyage at best. They made it clear, however, they were not going there to fight and they were not taking any firearms with them.

While it’s illegal for a U.S. citizen to aid in the overthrow of a foreign government for personal gain, it’s not illegal to travel to a foreign country to join in a fight against a dictatorial regime with the people of that country from a truly altruistic desire to help them gain their freedom and liberty. And if I were a young American of Cuban descent with family still living in Cuba, I probably would have already been a long time regular on Cuba’s shores, running arms and ammunition and joining in the fight to end the Castro Brothers’ days on earth.

There probably are a huge number of Americans, some of the younger expatriates from Cuba and even some of the children and grandchildren of the elderly Cuban expatriates, chomping at the bit to charge in fast and hard and put an end to this evil communist regime, more for the love of a memory of Cuba that only exists in the stories told and retold much more so than wanting to end a dangerous terror group that has been a thorn in the side of the United States since its inception, spreading its disease to parts of Africa and Venezuela too, and wherever its fellow communist travelers called upon its soldiers.

If we had the same competent military leadership that we had when America saved Grenada, deposed Panama’s President Noriega and ran numerous anti-communist operations throughout Colombia, Nicaragua and El Salvador, it would not be of too much concern to see an American force take the island and set about eradicating the hardcore Cuban Communist Party Cadre with extreme prejudice, and for those who warn against this as a green light for China to take Taiwan, the two aren’t really remotely similar. Taiwan has always declared and maintained its independence as its own sovereign country for many, many centuries of constantly fighting off the mainland’s attempts to completely subjugate it, and they too reject communism, just as the Cubans are doing today. Cuba, on the other hand, has always been heavily influenced by the United States’ politics and the economics of the day and if not for the Spanish-American War and Theodore Roosevelt’s advocacy, it would not have been it’s own nation by 1908.

Taking Cuba now would actually be in America’s best interests over the long run, for a litany of reasons associated with the Castro Communist Machine’s constant work in alliances with America’s enemies like Iran and the Soviet Union against America that has been focused on ultimately destroying America. To allow enemies to have such a conduit for anti-Americanism in the Western Hemisphere not only violates the Monroe Doctrine but in reality it also violates sheer common sense. But common sense runs in short supply in the Biden regime, and truthfully, it’s been in short supply across several administrations when speaking of national security, and it is most assuredly the case that we couldn’t trust today’s “woke military” and the Command overseeing it to conduct a proper mission for all the right reasons, and without them twisting it to serve their own agenda and financial gain, even as Joe Biden incredulously “calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves”, after pocketing billions of Chinese yuan and continuing the economic rape of America.

On December 20th 2020, Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote a piece regarding the dissident artist San Isidro Movement for the Wall Street Journal, noting:

“As the San Isidro Movement gains street cred in the barrion, support from other dissident groups, and recognition abroad, the question on the minds of long-suffering Cubans is whether this time things are different. There are good reasons to remain cautiously pessimistic about the odds of political change. But it’s also true that Cuban civil society seems to be undergoing a revival, and that makes the landscape markedly different than it was even 10 years ago.”

Unfortunately, given the political environment of the day in America and war fatigue and too many lost lives over twenty years of war in the Middle East, it appears that the Cuban people are on their own, waving the American flag or not, unless people of good faith and a love for freedom rush to their aid however best they can, just as we saw many foreign nations, like France, Spain and the Netherlands, and foreigners such as Jean Lafitte, a buccaneer, aid America to win Her freedom from the British in 1776. The Cuban people’s freedom will be won or lost by them alone, but they will surely lose without outside support willing to smuggle guns and ammunition and food goods and other necessities to their resistance movement, and if anyone is so inclined, they should get to it while the iron is hot.

In the face of all their adversities, we should all pray that the Good Lord helps them find the freedom and liberty they long to experience and deserve. Pray that Cuba’s children will one day live free. It’s been a long time coming.

Knowing my dear friend and author Humberto Fontova quite well, I suspect he wasn’t trying to be too humorous on July 12th, when, maybe with a little tongue-in-cheek, he wrote:

“History proves that if Cubans want U.S. military help against a dictatorship and then $BILLIONS and $BILLIONS for “nation-building” – they need to STOP WAVING U.S. FLAGS! and PRAISING AMERICAN CULTURE, for crying out loud! – They need to BURN U.S. flags! – And dress in malodorous robes, Hijabs and Keffiyeh, chant “DEATH TO AMERICA!” and relentlessly denounce every facet of western culture!” (Hey, worked like a charm for Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Libyans, ect.)

We can only hope for the Cuban people’s sake that Senator Rick Scott’s words are prophetic and come to pass:

“The people of Cuba are not afraid, your time is up!”

July 14, 2021

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.