OPINION:
Having grown up in the 1980s when our Cold War peaked with the Soviets, I was not a stranger to the dangers of Marxism. My mother, an ardent Ayn Rand objectivist, educated me at a young age about the importance of individual freedom and the dangers of sacrificing liberty for socialist “equality.”
Still, as much as I thought I understood about communism, I realized I had much more to learn after former President Donald Trump appointed me as an adviser to the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting in Miami. For nearly four years, I worked with Cuban opposition leaders and exiles who saw first-hand how a free society can crumble into intellectual ruins and reemerge as a dictatorship.
In time, I was all but adopted by the exile community as an American Cuban — a term reserved for non-Cubans who become swept away in joining the cause for liberty on the island. My new Cuban community taught me how communists use every weapon in their arsenal to dismantle freedom under the veil of correcting historical injustice. When proponents of critical race theory and “wokeness” started to silence dissenters and engage in historical revisionism, the Cuban exile community immediately recognized it as another form of Castroism.
Today, Marxists use critical race theory and cancel culture to brainwash our children, teaching them that our own Revolutionary War forefathers like Thomas Jefferson were evil while idealizing mass murderers like Che Guevara as champions of the downtrodden.
Fortunately, my home state of Florida has taken the lead on passing “portraits in patriotism” legislation, which now requires schools to teach “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.” The purpose of this legislation is to teach the evils of totalitarianism.
While some exile leaders are working with Florida officials to add to the school curriculum’s narrative about the Cuban Revolution, they are also collaborating to educate the general public at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami, known locally as “The Cuban.”
The Cuban has quickly evolved into an educational command center to teach the public about the dangers of communism. While featuring exhibits and events about how Castro’s 1959 “revolution” transformed a free society into a military dictatorship, it also hosts speaking events with guests who illustrate how to recognize the dangers of cultural Marxism in its most stealth forms.
During the past year, the museum’s main exhibit, titled “Operation Pedro Pan: The Cuban Children’s Exodus,” recreated the experience of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children who were transported to the U.S. by their parents in the immediate wake of Castro’s revolution. The Catholic Church worked with thousands of American families to help foster these young boys and girls, a testament to the determination of their Cuban parents who fought to spare their children from the horrors of communism, and the compassion of the American ones who welcomed them when they came to the United States.
The museum’s chair, Miami attorney Marcell Felipe, is now aiming to develop an interactive exhibit that recreates the experience of Castro’s 1959 revolution. This ambitious exhibit will simulate the terror endured by those who faced Castro’s televised “revolutionary justice” trials in stadiums and the brutal firing squad executions that followed.
This kind of simulation was done successfully in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which recreated the experiences of walking into a train car like the ones that transported Jews to concentration camps, and another in which a visitor could walk down a corridor resembling a street in Berlin during the Third Reich, riddled with Nazi propaganda.
In July, the museum hosted David Satter, a former Moscow Financial Times correspondent who discussed the philosophy underlying Soviet communism. The museum showed Mr. Satter’s documentary “Age of Delirium,” which retraced some of his experiences in Russia.
During his presentation, Mr. Satter discussed how the Soviet Union used historical revisionism to create a “false reality” that Russians were expected to acknowledge. Those who didn’t were often reported and stripped of what little rights they had. A subsequent discussion arose about Mr. Satter’s depiction of Soviet Russia and how it bared a frightening resemblance to cancel culture in the free world today.
On March 10, Professor Alan Dershowitz will speak about his new book, “Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process,” offering visitors a rare opportunity to listen to one of the nation’s most eminent constitutional scholars talk about the importance of preserving our civil liberties.
During my time in school during the 1980s, we said the pledge of allegiance to the American flag with pride, and my school teachers were not afraid to say the simple truth, that the United States was good and the Soviet Union was evil. They said this without reluctance because there was no cancel culture and because the treatment of citizens in both societies made it apparent that President Ronald Reagan was right when he termed the Soviet Union “an evil empire.”
By recreating the tragedy of the communist experience and accurately denouncing it as an ideology of slavery, The Cuban is setting the record straight while creating a model that Florida’s school system, and hopefully in time, other states will follow.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is the former director of the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting, currently collaborating with The Cuban museum (www.thecuban.org) on academic and journalistic conferences. He is also the assistant commentary editor of The Washington Times.
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