OPINION:
MIAMI — Sixty-five years ago, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled Fidel Castro’s reign of terror after he seized power in Havana. While Americans have had a glimpse into the 1959 Cuban Revolution’s stadium trials and firing squads from documentaries and Hollywood films, they can now travel back to the historic era as part of an interactive virtual experience — deep in the heart of Miami.
The Cuban Museum has opened its doors to “The Cuban Experience,” an interactive exhibit enabling visitors to walk through the chapters of the decades-old revolution, simulating what islanders faced when their homeland was transformed into a Marxist-Leninist nightmare.
This inventive concept was developed by the museum’s chairman, Marcell Felipe, a Cuban exile leader and lawyer whom I met seven years ago while working as a senior U.S. official for Radio and Television Marti — a Voice of America network that broadcasts objective news to the island.
“We wanted to create an interactive exhibit so people could walk through how Cuba went from being a prosperous democracy, which even superseded some European economies, to an impoverished dictatorship in just one generation,” Mr. Felipe told me. “We want visitors to have a virtual experience in the hopes they can understand that what happened in Cuba doesn’t just happen in poor countries. It can happen anywhere.”
I began working with Mr. Felipe at the museum in 2021. I got my first glimpse of the exhibit under construction during a tour arranged for then-Sen. Bob Menendez, one of the first Cuban Americans in Congress. Other champions of Cuban freedom, such as Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and more than half a dozen current and former heads of state have also taken the tour.
I walked through the final exhibit on Thursday, the day before its official Dec. 6 opening. Here’s a sneak preview of what I experienced:
Walking through a white marble corridor, the exhibit opens with quotes from Cuban freedom fighter Jose Marti, whose admiration for American republicanism inspired him to lead an independence movement against Spain in the late 1800s. It tells the story of how the U.S. helped fight the Cuban War of Independence from 1895 to 1898, and how American soldiers served under Cuban generals to aid their struggle for liberty. It chronicles how the island flourished as a free society from 1902 to 1951.
The visitor then enters a room with newspaper articles depicting how Cuba experienced a reversal of fortune when Gen. Fulgencio Batista seized power in 1952 and suspended the 1940 Constitution. Many believed that Castro would restore civil liberties despite warning signs he had a lust for power.
Turning the corner, I entered a long corridor with a room enshrined in red housing a simulated execution wall that re-creates what The New York Times titled “Cuban show trials” in Havana’s Sports City Stadium. There, counterrevolutionaries were “court martialed” as “war criminals” before a “frenzied crowd” of 18,000. As a lawyer, I found this part of the exhibit particularly frightening because it demonstrated how Castro’s institutionalizing of mob rule destroyed due process and Cuba’s justice system.
The entrance features a 1959 quote from Castro saying, “I am not a communist,” followed by a contrasting 1960 quote: “Elections? We are not interested in wasting our time on those things.”
Escaping the firing squad, I darted down a corridor featuring a timeline of how Castro nationalized Cuba’s private economy, seized businesses, confiscated property and abolished the free press while taking control of schools and churches.
This led me through a tunnel wallpapered with pro-Castro propaganda that exits into an area displaying “ideological report cards,” which required children to support Castroism to advance in school. Young people who resisted out of conscience or Christianity, and others identified as homosexuals, were sent to agricultural forced work farms where they labored from sunup to sundown seven days a week.
One side of this room resembles a barbed-wired work camp, while the other features a State Security officer shrouded behind a curtain using wiretaps to eavesdrop on citizens.
The next corridor tells the story of the exiles’ armed struggle against Castro, featuring organizations such as Alpha 66, MR-30-11, Omega 7 — and the Brigade 2506, a group of 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban American commandos who in 1961 landed at the Bay of Pigs in hopes of liberating their homeland.
This part of the exhibit ends with the CIA’s 1967 capture of Che Guevara, which leads into a simulation of Castro’s prisons with walk-in cells made of iron and mortar, telling tales of heroic Cuban political prisoners who resisted with hunger strikes.
Once I broke free from the prisons, I turned into a room that re-created the exoduses of the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibit highlights the Castro regime’s intentional 1996 downing of a private plane piloted by Brothers to the Rescue, an organization that saved Cubans lost at sea in the Straits of Florida. It also explains how the Castro regime has acted as a criminal cartel, profiting from drug and human trafficking.
The fearful journey through time ends on a bright note by transporting the visitor from communist Cuba to present-day Miami, with videos depicting how Cubans helped transform the city into a beautiful metropolis while showing Havana’s infrastructure crumbling under Castro’s failed dictatorship.
While the museum’s past exhibits illuminate the triumphs of Cuban culture and history, “The Cuban Experience” is its permanent flagship exhibit and the focus of its core mission: to provide a real-life interactive experience and cautionary tale of how free societies can be transformed into tyrannies, which is why its tagline is “why freedom matters.”
• 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 of The Washington Times.
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