OPINION:
MIAMI — Have you ever wondered what it would really feel like to face the terrors of a communist revolution — guerrillas seizing your property, facing Marxist “revolutionary justice” trial in a public stadium — only to be sentenced to a forced labor camp or firing squad? Early in the spring, Miami’s American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora will open a new tour enabling visitors to take a virtual walk through the 1959 Cuban Revolution. This powerful experience was the brainchild of the museum’s chairman, Marcell Felipe, an attorney and Cuban exile leader whom I met five years ago while working at the Miami-based U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting, known on the island as Radio and Television Marti.
“History isn’t just about reading and studying,” Mr. Felipe told me during a walk-through of the museum’s previous Pedro Pan exhibit. “It’s about experiencing, feeling and connecting with the lessons of the past.” One year later, Mr. Felipe’s dream was realized, and thanks to my tactical investigative journalism skills, I was able to sneak in during a special tour arranged for Sen. Bob Menendez.
Mr. Menendez was one of the first Cuban Americans in Congress and a key driving force behind the 1996 Libertad Act, which levied sanctions against the regime. He has spent the better part of his career crusading for Cuban freedom, and is one of the most fearsome spurs in the communist regime’s side. So I figured that if I was going to do a little time travel and endure the terrors of Fidel Castro’s communist revolution, I would be a lot safer doing it with this guy. Naturally, I did what reporters do best. I sneaked in and sidled up to the senator to get a glimpse. Here’s what I learned.
The exhibit is an architectural journey through the many phases of the revolution. The entire floor plan of the museum’s first level was redesigned to create different corridors, tunnels and rooms that take the visitor through different chapters of Cuba’s revolutionary experience.
My journey started with Cuban American leader Jorge Mas Canosa addressing Congress to thank the U.S. for opening its doors to anti-Castro exiles. It then sheds light on a largely unknown chapter in the late 1700s when Cuban residents raised funds for Gen. George Washington in his struggle for independence against the British, a chapter that introduced revolutionary ideas to the island. It then examines the Cuban War of Independence from 1895 to 1898; the 1898 Teller Amendment, which guaranteed the island would not get annexed; and the subsequent republican era in from 1902 to 1951, when Cuba flourished as the 29th-highest economy in the world. I then got a taste of Gen. Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 coup, when he suspended civil liberties, and learned that catastrophic move set the stage for the 1959 revolution.
Many Cubans believed Castro would establish a democracy and restore civil liberties. The exhibit highlights Fidel in 1959 expressing his intention to hold elections, while saying Marxism had no place in Cuba. It then shows how that promise was broken with mass executions, suspension of the constitution for the “transition” and the subsequent takeover of businesses, the media, schools and church. By 1961, the Castro regime controlled almost every aspect of Cuban life, and Fidel declared himself a Marxist-Leninist, dismissing elections as unnecessary.
The next journey is a time tunnel through the indoctrination of Castro propaganda. The tunnel of propaganda leads to a red curtain concealing eavesdropping devices used to monitor citizen conversations and show copies of “ideological report cards” used to blackmail children, making advancement in school impossible without showing support for the regime. Those who didn’t fit in were sent to dreaded UMAP work camps, an idea fostered by Che Guevara, who personally targeted religious youth, rockers and homosexuals.
The exhibit also shows the armed resistance to Castro, and how those captured were punished. I actually experienced a recreation of what The New York Times titled “Cuban show trials” in Havana’s Sports City Stadium where Batista aides were “court-martialed” as “war criminals” before a “frenzied crowd” of 18,000 jeering people. And shortly thereafter, I was faced with two possible fates: a virtual firing squad with imagery and sounds that resemble the execution in the fashion of “revolutionary justice” and a walk through prison corridors with actual mortar cells and iron doors. I slipped inside a “torture cell” so small I could barely move.
From the prisons, I entered an area depicting five different waves of immigration — a tool used by the regime as an escape valve to create pressure on the U.S. — including Pedro Pan children who escaped from 1960 to 1962, the 1965-1973 freedom flights and the 1965 Camarioca Boatlift, the 1980 Mariel Boatlift exodus depicted in “Before Night Falls” and “Scarface,” and the sinking of the tugboat 13 de Marzo in 1994.
The tour ends on an inspirational note in which the visitor is transported from the dark tunnels of tyranny in Cuba to the bright sunshine of freedom in Miami.
The exhibit illuminates Cuban achievements in music such as Gloria Estefan’s Miami Sound Machine to the relocation of Republic National Bank, the first institution to lend Cubans money without credit or collateral. It features the rise of Cubans, revealing that while they make up only 3% of Florida’s population, they represent 6% of its registered voters, and ends with photos comparisons of Havana before the revolution and how it is deteriorating today under communism.
Since the museum’s opening in 2004, it has been an educational source for Cuban culture and history. While the new exhibit focuses on the Cuban Revolution experience, it illuminates the political design of how communist revolutions erode freedom — an important lesson for all, especially in today’s global political climate.
• 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 also serves on the editorial board for The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.