Socialism as I witnessed it

By Ada Brownell

The first time I viewed television news, Fidel Castro’s military was mowing down men with a machine gun in front of a trench where their dead bodies fell.

It was 1960, if my guess is right. I was 22 years old. My husband and I had two young children.

I was horrified at what I had seen. We viewed the event when we were over at our neighbors’ house. The husband was a signal maintainer for the railroad. We didn’t own a television set, and that scene didn’t help me want one. We lived in Thompson, Utah. The little town had just shy of 100 people who built a tower so television signals would come in.

A few months later we bought a television, and the news usually wasn’t that violent. But everywhere television showed the multitudes of rafts Cuban people fashioned and loaded up with their relatives trying to get to America. Many of them drowned, and that continued for years.

I think the majority of them knew the risks. At one Trump rally recently with tears a man who escaped from Cuba told how his father risked everything to get his family to the United States. He asked, “Where else could we go?”

Communism was atheistic, and controlled people’s lives, even their thinking. I felt sorry for the Cubans.

That feeling never changed in the many years since, even though television reception has improved in the U.S. and they’re no longer controlling the people with machine guns. But sad to say, the promised Utopia— first with socialism, and then Communism, never came.

Cubans still are oppressed. When I was younger most of the cane sugar that fed the U.S. and maybe the world, came from Cuba, and I think most of the people who lived there before communism were comfortable financially.

The country now is open somewhat to tourists, but it’s tight by what I heard. My brother and his wife went on a mission trip a few years ago to work on a Cuban church building and do some other charitable work.

The church had a measure of freedom, but within limits. The people were poor and their lives supervised and controlled by the government.

A talented young man in the church already had his future planned by the government: where he could get higher education, what his career would be, and where he would work, although that wasn’t what he wanted to do.

Most people in the church lived in poverty, including the pastor.

For years Cuban autos have fascinated men. All their cars are old, but the guys knew their transportation depended on keeping them running, so a lot of men became the mechanic that would keep the vehicles running, probably from parts cannibalized from junked autos.

The cars on Cuban highways and streets are so old they would be valuable to collectors in the United States.

Any America who thinks, reads, and remembers history will not trade their freedoms for socialism, no matter how much “free stuff” is offered.

Every American should think before they vote.