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I Was Raised By Cuban Exiles. Here’s What They Taught Me About America.
January 20, 2009. That was the day Barack Obama was sworn into office as the 44th President of the United States.
When I got home from school, my family was gathered in the living room, and like millions of other homes across the country, our television was turned up to its highest volume. I was defeated, having lost every Facebook argument in defense of John McCain, but in reality, I didn’t care. What could go wrong anyway? We’re in America, for crying out loud — this is the greatest country on earth. We had just elected the first black president in the country’s history, and it seemed to make most of my friends happy.
My grandparents, far smarter than I, watched in anguish. My Abuelo Ernesto was tapping his foot uncontrollably, and my Abuela Norma had one tear lightly streaming down her face. Then she leaned over to me and said something I will never forget: “That sounds exactly like Fidel Castro.”
I thought she was absolutely insane. To me, the comparison was absurd. I assumed their experiences had made them overly sensitive to anything that even remotely resembled the rhetoric they had once heard in La Havana. This was America. America had institutions. America had a Constitution. America had safeguards that made something like Castro’s revolution impossible.
I would eventually realize just how right they were. But to understand why my grandparents reacted the way they did, we need to backtrack.
Both sides of my family escaped Cuba in the 1960s as Castro consolidated power and transformed the island into the Western Hemisphere’s first communist regime. They left before the system fully tightened its grip, but not before they saw the warning signs.
For them, it happened all at once. One day, nearly every newspaper and radio station parroted the same narrative. Russian influence began appearing all over the island — even on television — where the Soviets were suddenly portrayed as heroes rather than adversaries. Oh, and the Americans — their northern neighbors just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, who were, until Castro’s rise, Cuba’s dominant trading partner? Evil, greedy, capitalist pigs.
At school, children were encouraged to report their parents if they owned a gun or spoke critically of the government. Friends and families were torn apart over political differences, private farmland was ripped from their owners, and the universities were completely taken over by Marxism as propaganda ran rampant through the island.
Meanwhile, Castro denied that his revolution had anything to do with Marxism. Instead, he warned Cubans that the real threat was capitalism — that the real threat was America.
Obviously, history has proven otherwise.
According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of a million Cubans arrived in the United States in the 1960s following the revolution, with another quarter million arriving in the 1970s. As of 2024, there were 2.9 million people of Cuban origin in the U.S. — 23% more than in 2019, a reality that cuts through any romanticized narrative. People don’t fling themselves on rafts in the middle of the night, leaving their families and lives behind, to escape a purportedly prosperous and egalitarian society.
My Abuela Norma arrived in Miami with just $2 in her pocket and a small box of cigars, leaving her husband and eight-month-old baby on the island. She sold the cigars so she could afford a bus ticket to apply for a job. My Abuelo Ernesto had been an accountant in Cuba. In the United States, he started over by cleaning toilets and bussing tables as a janitor. My Abuelo Hernan escaped to Spain to follow his dreams of becoming a doctor, with Abuela Zoraida by his side, hauling their children and leaving everything behind.
When I heard these stories as a little girl, they were never imparted to me with bitterness — they were told and retold with gratitude. My upbringing in Miami filled me with stories of sacrifice, faith, and resilience. In my house, America was never something to apologize for. It was the country that gave my family the opportunity to rebuild everything they had lost. That perspective stayed with me even after I left Miami.
Many Americans travel to Cuba today and see it as a kind of frozen museum: vintage cars, crumbling buildings, and colorful streets perfect for an Instagram feed. What they often don’t realize is that Cuba once looked very different. Before Castro, it was one of the most advanced societies in Latin America. It was the first country in Latin America to implement a railroad system, broadcast television in color, and have centralized air conditioning in a hotel.
Now, in America, I turn on the news and hear the same slogans that I was raised to fear.
I hear politicians speak about “equity” in ways that sound less like opportunity and more like coercion. I hear capitalism blamed as the root of all injustice, as though the very system that lifted millions out of poverty is something to be dismantled rather than improved. I hear America described not as a force for good, but as something inherently oppressive — something to be apologized for, rewritten, even torn down.
And I think back to my grandparents, sitting on that couch in 2009, recognizing something I could not.
At the time, I dismissed their reaction as fear rooted in trauma. But history has a way of repeating itself — not always in identical form, but in familiar patterns. Revolutions rarely announce themselves as such. They don’t begin with declarations of tyranny. They begin with promises: fairness, justice, equality. They begin by identifying a villain — usually wealth, success, or an entire economic system — and convincing people that their suffering can be traced back to it.
Fidel Castro didn’t seize power by openly declaring, “I will install a communist regime.” He spoke of helping the poor. He spoke of justice. He spoke of dignity.
Today, in cities like New York, we hear voices like Zohran Mamdani echo similar themes — framing capitalism as exploitation, portraying America as fundamentally unjust, and offering sweeping government control as the solution. The language is modernized, the tone more polished, but the underlying premise is strikingly familiar: that the system itself must be torn down in order to achieve fairness. Ideas do not always need a violent revolution to take hold.
There’s a reason why The Daily Wire fights so hard against both big government censorship and the onslaught of Leftist propaganda in our culture. I take great pride in being able to contribute to that fight each day.
But as Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro recently pointed out in a speech at the University of Austin, there’s a reason why young people are taught to see their country primarily through the lens of its flaws — when success is reframed as oppression and economic freedom is recast as evil, the foundations of our country begin to shift.
In Cuba, my grandparents watched as universities became centers of Marxist thought and as dissent became dangerous. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened step by step, justified at every stage by appeals to fairness and progress.
That is why their reaction in 2009 was not irrational — it was informed.
They had seen how language can be used to reframe reality, how patriotism can be turned into suspicion, and how economic systems can be dismantled under the guise of compassion.
And they had lived the consequences.
I’m not saying America is on the brink of becoming Cuba. But no nation is immune to the influence of ideas — especially when those ideas are presented in ways that sound virtuous on the surface.
Socialism does not arrive all at once. It seeps in through rhetoric that reshapes how people think about success, fairness, and their own country. It gains ground when people forget history, or worse, when they are never taught it at all.
In 2009, my grandparents did not have the luxury of ignoring those warning signs. They recognized them because they had lived them.
As I listen to the conversations happening in America today, I find myself hearing the echoes I had once dismissed. And this time, I’m the one sounding the alarm.
***
Savy Dominguez Morris is senior producer of The Ben Shapiro Show.
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