David Horowitz newsletter

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

The following is a David Horowitz newsletter that I just received:

______________________________________________________________________________

James, eighteen years ago, I presented the Freedom Center’s Annie Taylor Award to a former Cuban political prisoner by the name of Armando Valladares, and I wanted you to hear his story.

Seeing these videos and pictures of the protests in Cuba roll in, I can’t help but be reminded of Armando -- because I know what he endured for 22 years, rotting in a Cuban prison.

And I know the bravery it takes for an unprecedented number of Cubans to do the same.

There was nothing brave about the Black Lives Matter riots and protests that swept our country. They risked nothing and they sacrificed nothing. Even with a president that opposed them, they knew they were safe.

The Cuban protesters know what they’re doing could very well be a death sentence -- and they’re doing it anyway.

American leftists are doing everything in their power to excuse, justify and protect the Cuban regime. They’re blaming it on COVID, the U.S. embargo -- and everything but what the Cuban people are actually protesting against. No one in the Biden administration will even call “communism” by name.

James, I’m sharing a portion of the speech I gave eighteen years ago, because I won’t let the Left rewrite history, or deny reality. This is what’s happening to the Cuban people, and this is what awaits us right here in the United States if we surrender to socialism.

Sincerely,

David Horowitz

Early one morning in the year 1960, Armando Valladares, who was 23 years old and still asleep in his parents' house, was wakened by the cold barrel of a machine gun pressing his head into the pillow on his bed. There were three gunmen standing over him. A fourth kept watch on Valladares' mother and sister in another room in the house. These men were agents of Castro's new political police. After ordering Valladares to get dressed, they took him away.

Armando Valladares' crime was this: Castro had been appointing communists to his new government even though he had sworn that his revolution would bring freedom to Cuba. Many people in Cuba who supported the revolution were concerned. Some were saying that Castro was a communist himself. To combat these fears, Castro had his agents print up a slogan. He had them put it on decals, bumper stickers, tin plaques, wall posters, and in the daily press. The slogan was this: "If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He's got the right idea."

The communists of the Ministry of Communications came to the Postal Savings Bank and to the desk of Armando Valladares. They handed him a card bearing the slogan and told him to put it on his worktable. The 23-year-old Valladares refused. Taken aback, the communists asked him if he had anything against Castro. Valladares answered that if Castro was a communist, he did.

For this crime, Armando Valladares was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Like all of Castro's political prisoners, he was tortured and humiliated. He was made to eat other men's excrement and forced to watch his friends die. One of Valladares' prison friends was a youngster named Roberto Lopez Chavez. He was just a kid, and he went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water until he became delirious, twisting on the floor of his cell and begging for a drink. The guards urinated in his mouth and on his face, and he died the following day.

The political prisoners in Castro's jails were given a choice. You could be rehabilitated and save yourself from these torments if you renounced who you were. All you had to say was, "I have been wrong. All my life has been a mistake. God does not exist. I want you to give me this opportunity to join a communist society." Of Cuba's 80,000 political prisoners, 70,000 took this path of rehabilitation. Armando Valladares was not one of them. "For me," he said, "that would've meant spiritual suicide. All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my freedom. My freedom is not the space where you can walk around. There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk, and they are not free."

Describing his incarceration, Valladares said, "For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instil in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.”

SUPPORT THE FREEDOM CENTER

David Horowitz Freedom Center

P.O. Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499

______________________________________________________________________________

This is socialism. Imagine the above scenario replicated hundreds of thousands of times. That is socialism in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc. It has happened over and over and over. You would think people would learn from other people’s experiences. But people are fools. They never learn. They don’t think. They just follow other people, follow the latest fashions. They just follow what seems to be trendy. They want change, they want the latest. What fools they are!

We live in a bad world. The devil is everywhere. Huge numbers in this world suffer under evil systems. America has been a very special country with a good, well thought out system. And fools would like to take it down and replace it with a fool’s system.

It is like being on a great ship in which the passengers choose the ship’s captain by vote. There are lots of great speeches. And then the vote. And the foolish, easily deceived people choose some foolish, ignorant moron for captain. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if you were not on that ship!

25 July 2021