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July 30, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
01:01:15
Rudy Giuliani's Miami Roundtable Q&A on Cuba | Ep. 159
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Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm coming to you with another edition of Rudy's Common Sense, and this one is going to be a little bit different, because it's going to involve interviews with Cuban Americans who are very familiar with Cuba, the current Cuba, and they'll tell us what's really going on in Cuba, rather than being subjected to the propaganda that we get in the left-leaning press.
Which also seems to have a soft spot for communism, not much of a soft spot for the freedom, democracy, and liberty that we have here in the United States.
So we'll get it right from the proverbial horse's mouth.
The people who are talking to the people in Cuba, and a few of them, people who have put their lives at risk numerous times to try to free their country, including a great hero, Felix Rodriguez, Who also came and volunteered and helped us in the Vietnam War.
So these are people with great credibility.
They're not politicians.
The mayor will be here, of course, to introduce it.
And he's been 100% on this issue because his own family is involved in it.
So we're going to have a very, very interesting podcast that hopefully educates the American people.
Welcome to the Versailles restaurant in the middle and the heart of Little Havana.
You know, this restaurant has a great history and when finally, and I think it's going to be sooner rather than later, Cuba is liberated and many of these people can go back to their homeland and help rebuild it and still remain Americans, dual citizen.
It's a ship like we have in so many cases.
I mean, this place will be recorded in history.
It's kind of the Fraunces Tavern.
of the Cuban resistance.
This is the place where everybody met, this is the place where everybody made plans, and this is the place that if you're serious about running for office in this place, you better have an event.
I've been here so often for political events, I feel a little unusual in my role as a reporter and a questioner, but I'll try.
We're going to start, as we should, with the mayor of Miami.
Because this is the locus, and like many people don't realize about a mayor, but because I do, it's a much more complicated job than you think.
You got to be a foreign policy expert, and if you're mayor of Miami, you better know about Cuba.
And this man knows a lot about Cuba, and I'm going to ask him to give me his view Because it'll be a very informed one of what happened.
Mayor Suarez is second term now?
That's right.
We're about to be hopefully now in November.
You're leading by so much.
We never count on Paul's.
That's right.
But I mean, he's doing an excellent job.
We're going to talk about that a little bit because I think it might be helpful to mayors in other places that this place has a hold on crime.
It wasn't always that way in Miami.
Miami has been at times the crime capital of America.
Yep.
So, Mayor Suarez, thank you very much.
Mayor, thank you so much for inviting me.
Thanks for having me.
So, can I start with what you said on the 11th of July when this broke out in Santiago de los Baños?
Yep, yep.
Did you know it was going to happen or were you shocked as well?
I was as shocked as everyone.
I think the Cuban government was taken by surprise.
I think the U.S.
government was taken by surprise.
That's what I believe.
I mean, I don't have the inside information, but I think that's right.
I mean, to see something that was spontaneous in over 40 cities and towns across the island of Cuba, there's nothing that's even approximated that.
I think in 1994, there were some spontaneous You know, in Havana, which is the capital.
But we've never seen something so broad.
And obviously there's a lot of reasons why, and there's game-changing reasons like the internet and social media that didn't exist very prevalently in the 1990s.
But I think what's important is that people have lost their fear.
And that is something that the regime has always used against the people, is the fear, the repression.
And it's something that was incredibly inspiring to us here in Miami.
Well, I mean, I was completely shocked by it.
And from everything I know, people I talk to in Washington, this is not a criticism now of the administration.
I do that enough.
Yeah.
But they were surprised.
And I think had Trump been president, he would have been surprised.
Sure.
But it says something very, very important.
I mean, if it's true, and I think it is, if this was basically spontaneous, based on social media, this thing affected the whole island within two hours.
And within two hours, the island was... I have a little map here.
Within two hours, the island was just... Wow, look at that.
Look at that.
I mean... That's incredible.
I looked at this and I said, my goodness, it's all the way from Morocco?
Baracoa, yeah.
Baracoa to Mantua on the other side.
Completely comprehensive.
And of course, the big push is in... Concentration, right.
But still, you've got it all over the place.
So, how did this happen?
What's going on there that's so different now than... Look, they've been oppressed for years.
They've been starving for years.
There have been sanctions since 61.
At times less than this, at times more than this.
What's going on?
You know, what's interesting about this is, you know, for many, many years here in the Cuban exile community, it was about what happened in the 1960s.
And the fact that, you know, so many, my father, my grandparents, you know, their properties were taken, their businesses were taken, they were exiled out of the country.
That was the fight for many, many years.
What's interesting about this particular moment is these Children, these men and women were children of the revolution.
They were brainwashed to become communists or to be communists from the moment they were born.
And they have seen through the fraud and the fact that this system of government is an abject failure.
It's failed everywhere in the history of humanity that's been tried.
And you know, when I think about the hundreds of thousands of people that have been killed by this regime, by this government, You know, you put that in the balance of the millions of people who have had their hopes and dreams taken away.
You know what it is to be an adult, 20 years old, 25 years old, and to not have hopes and dreams because you know that there's nothing to look forward to.
in your country.
And I think that's where the rubber meets the road.
That's where, you know, someone who was born and raised on this communist ideology realizes
that it's a complete fraud, that the only ones that are benefiting are the upper echelon,
you know, the president and his and the generals and things like that.
And so, you know, our hope is that this is one of those moments in time that we've seen
throughout the history of humankind, where the people are able to liberate themselves.
And frankly, I think it's also an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate leadership.
And as you said, as a mayor of a city like New York and Miami, we have to know what's happening.
And in your case, you were talking about in the Middle East, you're talking about, you know, in Greece and Macedonia.
For us, it's in South America and Central America and Haiti, you know, what's happening in Cuba.
I mean, people should realize Sometimes they still have the view of Miami, you know, beautiful beaches and parties.
This is the capital in America for Latin America and South America.
This is the first place people there think of to come and to do business.
Now, they may go a lot of places, but this is the locus of it.
Well, the way New York was, the people from Europe, So, you've got to keep up on all of these things, but this is the current one right now.
How is it affecting the Cuban-Americans in Miami?
Are they hopeful?
They seem like they're very hopeful.
They're very inspired.
There's a saying that says, Si Cuba está en la calle, Miami también, meaning that if Cubans are on the streets, we're going to be on the streets.
And we want to demonstrate solidarity with the Cuban people that we're demonstrating that we're here to emotionally support them.
We're here to put pressure on our own government because we're Americans.
I was born here in this country.
I'm an American.
And I'm very proud of the moments on both Republican and Democratic administrations in the history of humanity where the U.S.
has intervened to help people become free.
We have lost... That's our mission in the world.
It has been.
And I remember, you know, a Colin Powell quote where he once said that the only land we ever took was enough land to bury the dead bodies of the people.
Isn't that true?
Isn't that true?
We've never had territorial ambitions as a country.
We just want people to be free.
Maybe this is an opportunity for us to give Americans a reminder with all this bad attacks by Black Lives Matter and this group and that group about how awful we are and how terrible we are, that this is a country that has given up more lives to free other countries than any country in the history of the world.
And as you said, not the way England did it, not the way Rome did it, not the way to take an empire, but just to have peace.
You have good trading parts.
Listen, it's amazing.
My parents came when, my dad came when he was 12.
Tell me your personal background because these are so instructive to people who might not know it.
So, it's a great story.
My dad is the ninth of 14 kids.
He came when he was 12 years old to this country.
My mother, the ninth of 14.
Well, let's tell them your dad was the first.
He was the first Cuban mayor of Miami.
Yes.
His first name?
He's Xavier.
Xavier Suarez.
You might have been mayor right around the time you were.
I know.
Yeah.
I worked with him.
He was a very fine mayor.
Thank you.
Tough guy.
Yes.
So he was... Was he a tough father?
No, he was a good guy.
He was a tough man.
He was.
He's 72 years old now.
But, uh, so, you know, he came when he was 12.
My mom came when she was six.
My dad was blessed to get full scholarships to high school, to college, to... You know, I called you the first time I saw you.
I called you for about six months, Xavier Suarez.
Yeah, it's okay.
Most people do, though.
It's okay.
I couldn't get your father anymore.
I'm Francis Xavier, like the Jesuits sing.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I know it.
Francis Xavier is a very common name for a Catholic.
Sure, sure.
I would just say Xavier Suarez.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's okay.
It happens all the time.
But I also want to get to another thing.
We are suffering throughout America with what has to be described as a crime epidemic.
Particularly in the older cities, particularly in the northeastern and midwestern cities.
I mean, 100% increase in murder, 100% increase in shooting.
Your crime rate is down.
It's been down for a couple of years.
Before COVID, through COVID, and down again.
I came here as Associate Attorney General for Ronald Reagan because this place in 1981 and 82 had become a crime capital.
Yep.
I mean, you were a bad city.
Yep.
So what are you doing?
You can just share with your brother and sister.
Just to give you a perspective of how bad it was in the eighties.
In 1980, the murder rate was 220 were the murder capital of the United States.
Like you said, this last year, the year before we had 54, which was the second lowest rate since 19, since like the 1950s.
So, yep.
And we've done it sort of the old-fashioned way.
You know, while cities across America are defunding their police, guess what we did?
We increased funding for our police.
We had the most... I'm almost laughing because it's such common sense.
We had the most police officers we've ever had in our history.
And guess what?
Shocking correlation.
Crime went down.
More police officers, crime went down.
And then we've armed our officers, who are phenomenal, with the latest technological tools ever.
Tell me the two things you have to do.
We have a gunfire detection system called ShotSpotter.
ShotSpotter?
I know a GPS precision.
Anytime a gunshot is fired in my city, instantly.
Okay?
And the second thing is... ShotSpotter.
Remember that, Mayor.
Go look at it.
And there's a second generation with drones that we have to look at.
And then we also have something called an ABIN machine so we can get ballistics for guns that are used in homicides.
And we don't need to go to the FBI.
We can do that ourselves in-house.
Can I just claim a little credit?
Sure.
How much did Timothy contribute to you guys thinking technologically?
He did a lot.
He did a lot.
He was at number three in command.
He was phenomenal.
You know, we went 24 months, I think, without a police-involved shooting here in Miami.
So he did a great job for training.
And that was always a problem for us, too.
They would lead to those riots.
Yep, yep.
Of course.
That's what I was in law enforcement.
So I have to really congratulate you.
Thank you, man.
Because you're doing actually...
You're taking the old-fashioned remedies that still work, and you're bringing in the new technology.
I can't think of Miami being in better hands during a very tough period like this.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
I appreciate it.
You have to deal with COVID.
You've got to deal with the rest of the immigration problems.
You've got to deal with crime.
And all of a sudden, now you've got a big disruption.
But this may be a good thing now.
And I'm going to be president of the U.S.
Conference of Mayors beginning January 1st.
Can I ask one last question?
Sure.
Do you guys share information quite a bit?
We do, and I want to have an agenda for urban America.
That would help me a lot.
I want to have an agenda for urban America that talks about low taxes, more police officers, and technology economy.
If you don't mind, I'd like us at some point in the near future to do a thing just on that for the benefit of the other nation.
Of course.
Thank you, man.
God bless you, and good luck, and I'm sure Dad's very proud.
Thank you.
I'm sure he is.
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Well, we're back now with two very, very interesting guests and two people that know a great deal about this.
Carmen Valdivia and Maximo Alvarez.
And both of them are going to explain in their own way how they come to know so much about this.
Carmen is the Executive Director of the Museum of the Cuban Diaspora.
This is the Cuban Diaspora, people who left Cuba, but maintain a great, great ongoing interest in their country.
Because they feel it needs to be fixed.
And Maximo Alvarez is with his own Sunshine Gasoline Distributors.
He's one of the biggest gasoline distributors in Florida.
And he was born in Cuba in 1948, which makes him younger than me.
And both of them share in common something they're going to explain to you, coming here on a program called Pedro Pan.
Which was in the mid-50s.
So let me start with you, Carmen, and let's first go to what is happening right now, and then you can tell us your background, because both are very important.
So, this was a surprise to you.
July 11, and to you also?
There's nobody that wasn't surprised by this.
No, it caught me completely by surprise.
As a matter of fact, I wasn't expecting anything like that.
And then it made me so proud that they only ask for liberty, which means freedom, because people like to say that they're asking for COVID vaccines or food or anything.
It's liberty.
They can Google it and it means freedom.
That's all they're asking for.
And it just breaks my heart to see that all they want is a chance.
You know, they don't want fish.
They want to fish for themselves.
All they want is a chance to, you know, to live in freedom.
So it breaks out in Santiago de Los Banos, which is a fairly small city outside of Havana.
Right.
All of a sudden, within three hours, it's all across the country.
I mean, that's a remarkable map.
Incredible.
When I saw this map, I said, this is a real revolution.
I've seen a couple, and I know pretty much when they're at the tip.
This is at the tip.
Now, this happened, and you know, I guess there's a lot of cynicism about it, This happened as far as I know.
Spontaneous.
By social media.
How do they accomplish this?
So you have a breakout in Santiago.
How all of a sudden are you getting a breakout in Mantua all the way over here and well over by Guantanamo?
It's amazing.
It's amazing how they communicate because all the communications are restricted in Cuba by the government.
Right.
Because there's no freedom.
So it's amazing how these people were able to manage at the same time, go out in the street, which shows you the desperation that these people must have.
And as Carmen said, they're not asking for anything.
They're just asking for freedom.
And you know, what a lesson to our country.
They're waving the American flag and here we burn it.
Respectfully.
When I see the American flag in a demonstration now, I feel like I want to go take it.
I almost did it during COVID.
There's a demonstration in Brooklyn and these people are, you know, sort of putting the flag down and I told the cops, get that flag away from there.
That thing's going to be on the floor in a minute.
What is amazing is We are probably the only country that enjoys that freedom.
We're probably the only hope that these people have.
And here, we burn the flag.
And we don't say anything simply because we have the right to do so.
Which, by the way, a lot of people have died to protect the right to do that.
Yes, yes, yes.
But at least, at least be grateful.
At least understand Why does everybody want to come over here?
Why do these people who burn the flag?
I don't know.
We're systemically racist.
Why don't they go?
Why do you want to come to a systemically racist country?
But everybody seems to do it.
I don't see any lines here to leave.
No.
Everybody wants to come here.
I don't see any boats heading to Cuba.
I see boats heading to the U.S.
And Mayor, you know what is so sad?
Mayorga, who happens to be a Cuban, In charge of immigration.
Do not want these people to come over, but he's got the border open to anybody.
But you know what they are?
They are afraid.
You know why?
because the people in Cuba now know what communism is like.
What you explain, explain, you're not too much talking about,
he's talking about the new head of the department of Homeland Security, who's supposed to be,
really, I mean, this guy's in charge of a lot of things for us.
Exactly.
To keep us safe, including, you know, hacking and all this other thing that's going on like crazy,
which he seems to not have a clue about.
No.
But he makes a ridiculous statement like a threat.
Don't you come over or we'll stop you.
Now, okay, I can understand that, but not if you're letting in 150,000 people a month
and you don't check them for COVID.
I know that a bunch of those people are MS-13 because they come up to New York and they terrorize towns in New York, every place else, Massachusetts, all over the country.
They chop people's heads off, to start.
But those will become Democrats.
The ones who understand communism will never be a Democrat.
Both.
The guy who chopped the head off, and then the guy who dies becomes a Democrat.
Instead he gets the vote.
I mean, that's a very kind thing to Democrats to do.
It's true, it's true.
That is good.
For the dead people, they get a chance to, you know.
Yes, they do.
Well, in any event, when you heard this, when you heard this, What did it say to you about where things are in Cuba?
And have you been hearing that for the last couple of years?
Because I know both of you maintain contact with people in Cuba.
Do you have relatives there?
Not that I know.
Most of the people that I left behind have died already.
So I have cousins, but I haven't met them.
Because they were born after I left.
Any of them by virtue of the regime?
I don't know because I don't have contact with them.
Pedro Pan was from 1960 to 1962.
I do have friends in Japan. From 1960 to 1962. December of 1962. So everybody came across at the same time. Yeah, 22
months for 14,000 children.
Explain what it was.
Okay, as I said, between December of 1960 and October 1962, 14,000 Cuban children were sent to the U.S.
by their parents in order to avoid indoctrination by the nascent revolutionary government.
Schools have been nationalized, nuns and priests... Right away?
It took them two years.
And 61 is when they nationalized the schools and threw out the nuns and the priests that used to educate us.
And then they closed all schools for restructuring.
And then eight months later, they opened new books, new history.
Everything was new.
And Marxism was the law of the land.
So then our parents said, no, you're not going to that school.
It was very anti-imperialistic and also they changed history.
Everything was different.
Yes.
And teaching them 1619 that America was founded for slavery?
Yes, yes.
It was very anti-imperialistic and also they changed history.
Everything was different.
And they were also very anti-religion.
Yes, religion was outlawed and you have to become a Marxist.
And that's when our parents, you know, most Pedro Pans were people of faith.
We had 93% of us were Catholic.
We had 396 Jewish Pedro Pan and about 700 Protestants.
And so our families were people of faith and they refused to have us become literal Marxists.
And so they decided that to part with us was better than to have us indoctrinated.
Well, how did How did Castro go through this?
Why would he agree to this?
He's trying to keep you all there in subjugation.
Why does he let a group of people go?
Just let me add to what she said.
They even made it illegal to call a child a biblical name.
That's how extreme they went.
How did he do this?
He did this by completely lying to everybody simply because Batista had lost control of the island because of all the terrorism that was taking place.
He used to call it Guerra de Guerrillas, where you could not go out to a movie at night because a bomb will explode.
So it got to the point that people were fed up with that, and they thought that this is the new beginning, this is the future, because he promised things that are unbelievable.
Promise things like the Reforma Agraria, the Agrarian Reform, where actually the Agrarian Reform, the way he proposed it, was nothing but profit sharing.
Something that we have in America.
But it was not like that.
That's what people thought.
He offered health care, which is what we already had in Cuba, because in Cuba, for $1.29 a month, you had access to the hospital and the best doctors.
So it started falling apart right from the beginning?
Right from the beginning, he started changing.
In about a month, everybody started seeing, you know, you had communists being put in positions of power.
Why did this dictator who wants to control everything, why did he let these people back?
Because we would be the people that would give him problems.
Yes and so it was easy you know he always is very good about the only thing he knows how to do is repression because economy and everything you know he fails but then he knew that we would be giving problems so he always has this escape valve as he's had along the way, you know, with Marioka and Marielle and all that.
So this was the first escape boat.
He let us out.
We were Catholic.
We were trained.
We would not go for his, you know, re-education.
And so it's better to let us out.
And also, then if our parents followed, he would get a house for the peasants.
And he said this in speeches, let the bitongos go, which is like... I would imagine he had no conception of how successful we were.
No, no.
Because you pose really, along with the brave people there, they have a kind of support that a lot of people don't have.
Exactly.
They have a community. I say this to you, and I've known this for years,
You're probably one of the most successful immigrant communities ever in the history of America.
Not only successful, but boom!
Quickly successful.
Which make you very important.
The city of Miami, day after tomorrow, the 28th, is going to be 125 years old.
It's his birthday.
62 of those years, or half, Cubans have been in Miami.
Now, if you take a look at Havana in 1959 and Havana now, And compare it to Miami in 1959 and Miami now, you can see what we have done.
We'll be back with Carmen and Maximo, because this is a very, very important and critical issue that we're getting to, because evaluating the chances of this happening are very, very important to us.
But most important, if you can bring liberty to people, then you've accomplished something in your life.
I don't know.
It's gonna work real well when you go up there and you say, I helped to deliver liberty to them.
Let's take a brief pause.
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Welcome back to our very, very revealing interviews about what's gone on and what's going on in
Cuba right now from people who really know.
We have with us now Manolo Reyes, who's a commissioner of the city of Miami.
He was elected with 57% of the vote.
Yes.
A lot of people would die for that nowadays, but we won by two votes.
Well, I've worked very hard for it.
I know you did.
You're doing a great job.
Everyone tells me that.
And then we have with us Ricardo Howe-Josa.
Ricardo is an artist.
He's an art collector.
He's a writer.
Here's what I would describe as an intellectual, and a very, very well-known one, and a very well-respected one.
So, two different perspectives, but both born in Cuba.
So let's go to you, Commissioner, first.
You were born in Cuba.
Tell us how you came here, as it's been described.
Well, I came in 1959.
My father, he was the last mayor of the city, Victoria de Gastuna, and when the revolution The first group that they were persecuting is anybody that was with any government before.
And my father, although he wasn't charged with any crime or anything, but they still kept on, I would say, persecuting him.
What would they do?
Well, they will try to get him into the army barracks and to interrogate him.
And he said, I'm not going to go through this.
So he got into the Honduran embassy.
And afterwards, he went to Honduras and came to the United States.
And by October 1958, we were able, me and my sister and my mother, to leave Cuba and come and you joined him in Miami.
Yes.
Effectively took over on January 1st, 1988.
And you were out by October.
By October, I was.
And you came, you as children, you were in as part of a program.
No, I did, I'm not a Pedro Pan.
You know, that came later.
The thing is, it just happened.
We always had a close relationship with the United States.
My father, my grandfather studied in New York.
My father studied, he went to school in Philadelphia.
And we had, I mean, we used to come here a lot.
I mean, almost every two years we used to come here.
Am I right or am I, and talking to so many Cuban Americans, I don't detect the same Hostility, chip on the shoulder about America.
You do, let's say in some other South American country, you know, if I were talking to somebody from Argentina or even Venezuela before all this happened, I'd get a certain, or if I talk to somebody from Colombia, they sort of love America.
So it's different.
I get the sense that there's a great affection for America.
Absolutely.
There were a lot of Cubans that they came to school in the United States and studied here.
And that is why Cuba was so prosperous also.
Because most of the entrepreneurs that we had in Cuba, they had the background in the United States.
If you see, take for example, Cuba was the first country that had TV.
In Latin America, I mean, a TV station.
We had 23 TV stations, I mean, when Castro took over.
And that's because the person that started the TV station in Cuba, that person went to school, was an engineer that came to school in the United States.
We had one general from the Independence War, and he was a president, Menocal, he was a graduate of Cornell, you see, and there were a lot of Cubans that they used to come here, including my father and my two uncles, two uncles that came to Jefferson College and they became doctors.
You see, that was this exchange of Cubans in the United States and most of the entrepreneurship So America gained a great deal from the community.
So America gained a great deal from the community.
Now, tell us, well, let's begin with how you got out first.
Well, I was six years old in 1960.
The communists have been in power since January 59.
My mother and father, we were lower middle class individuals and didn't have any money.
At that time, most of the people... What would that mean in Cuba in that day?
Middle class, lower middle class.
Well, there was a burgeoning middle class in Cuba.
Yeah.
Huge middle class.
These are people that could support themselves.
Yeah, absolutely.
The idea that somehow it was just oligarchs and the rest of the destitute.
Well, that's the impression.
That's part of the propaganda.
You had the Batista rich and then you had abject poverty.
You can't have a revolution without a middle class.
Absolutely right.
The poor can riot.
The poor can rebel, you know, organically.
But a middle class is what eventually produces.
And what did your parents do?
What was theirs?
My father was a draftsman, industrial construction, steel.
And my mother was in retail.
And at six, you were nothing.
I was six.
That was a kid.
But I remember distinctly the need to flee because my parents understood what was coming.
Do you remember it?
Oh boy.
When you go through a trauma like that, you remember it.
Four, five, and six, we have some memories.
We don't have others.
Something like that, I guess, would stay with you.
Yeah, because I remember the hysteria that suddenly gripped.
And what was the proximate cause of their leaving?
Well, my parents saw that hysteria and saw it as a threat.
Realized that this was, you know, what was coming was a totalitarian state.
Did they think they'd be particularly targeted or they'd just be part of the group that was going to be suppressed?
They understood that in a totalitarian system, everybody is targeted.
Everything is controlled by the state.
Everyone is at the mercy.
How much of it was they didn't want their child to grow up in this?
Wasn't that a lot of it?
A lot of that.
So I had an older sister.
We left.
We went to Chicago.
We had no money.
That's interesting.
You must have come to Miami first.
Yeah, Miami.
But Miami was a very, you know, small sort of resort kind of place.
There wasn't any work here.
So my father had already been in Chicago, had gone to Chicago a few months earlier to get a job.
And we followed suit in December 1960.
Was it easy to get out, or did you have to do things?
At that time, we did get a visa at the American Embassy, and that wasn't easy, but we managed it, and then we got on one of the last commercial flights of KLM, and came to Miami, and then from there on a train to Chicago.
And the Castro government didn't stop you?
No, because we weren't involved in any sort of political stuff, and we didn't have money, so it was, you know...
Off we went.
I do.
I do, as a matter of fact.
when you look at this, what's going on there. Do you maintain contacts with people in Cuba?
Oh sure. Do you? I do, I do. I do as a matter of fact that, see I've been here for 62 years and
I still have a couple of friends left that... You talk to them on the phone and they tell you?
You've got to be careful, don't you?
Yes, I mean, in Cuba you have to be careful of whatever you do.
Because if you talk about cancel culture, they are the masters of cancel culture.
And that started at the beginning.
If you didn't think like them, if you didn't talk like them, if you didn't go to the concentrations that they had with Castro, Fidel would talk for hours and hours.
You were ostracized, you see?
You were, I mean, you could lose your job, your ration card, et cetera, et cetera.
And it is very, I mean, many people, they have a lot of fear in what they say.
I mean, that's why this, I mean, I would say that this, all these marches and all this rebellion that's going on in Cuba, it is amazing how brave these people are, because that will cost them Could cost them their livelihood.
Part of the shock here, and correct me if I'm wrong, is although the oppression there has been terrible, and the stories are terrible, and the truth is terrible, there hasn't been anything like this in 62 years.
And it spontaneously affected the whole country.
Well, it belies the propaganda that this revolution had shaped a whole new people and that everybody was now Marxist and, you know, we're all building socialism.
The people that live under Marxism know perfectly well what a corrupt and vicious system it is.
And when these people are screaming for liberty, they hit it on the head.
And that's something that most of the leftists in our society are very nervous about because they're not just crying for food or for this or that.
They're really crying for freedom because they understand that unless you get rid of this totalitarian system, you won't have anything else.
Life itself won't even be worth the struggle.
How much risk are they in?
I don't think we've covered the fact that within about four or five hours of this demonstration, the police and the army were out on the streets.
Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Beating people up, arresting people, shooting people.
And later going into their homes, arresting people.
And then they put them in jail, and we don't even know how many are in jail.
And they are now that they're going to summary trials, you see, people that the family had gone to find, trying to find the relatives, and they have already been trialed, and they're sentenced to one year, two years, four years, and I heard that they gave one of the demonstrators 25 years.
And this is a...
This isn't a trial, really.
This is like, oh, there's an old story in the West with Judge Roy Bean.
You know, we're going to have to execute the guy.
Oh, yeah, but let's give him a trial first.
Absolutely.
The sentence is predetermined before you're guilty.
There's no defense attorneys.
Amnesty International, which is pretty left, says no lawyer, no witnesses.
Kind of like the way the Democrats impeach Trump.
Absolutely.
I'm wondering if Nadler and Shifty Shift aren't there advising them.
But we'll be back.
We're going to be back in a short while.
We'll have time to cover more of this.
And we're going to take a little break now, and then we're going to come back and go into a little more detail.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you.
Oh no, thank your community for never forgetting what you left behind.
Some people would forget it, you didn't.
You don't know how much admiration I have for the Cuban-American community.
Well, I tell everybody that I have two mothers, the United States and Cuba.
We'll be back shortly with two other guests.
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Welcome back!
We have with us Carmen Valdivia and we have with us Felix Rodriguez who were with us shortly before and we want to move on to a slightly different subject.
Felix, you have probably been more active than anyone In the physical, the hard work of trying to overthrow this regime, including you were involved in the Bay of Pigs.
You commanded the group that got rid of Kay.
We've been involved in going into that island surreptitiously and quietly on behalf of the CIA to get information for years and then you fought in other wars.
You're quite a warrior and a great hero to me and to many, many other people.
You probably have the pulse of the Cuban people because you've been in there so much under these highly pressured situations.
This is a man, by the way, who's also received some of the highest awards for bravery in the American army because he fought in Vietnam.
He became a citizen so he could get into the army to go fight in Vietnam, but we had people running to Canada.
So you've got to admire this man.
So, what's your evaluation of what happened and what will happen?
I mean, where does this go from here?
Now that this has happened, how do you evaluate it and where does it go from here?
Well, really, this was a very big surprise to all of us, what happened that day.
Nobody expected it.
And it's extremely important what happened.
Because it was a popular uprising in one city that was not organized.
It was the outbreak of people that are up to here with the regime.
That they cannot stand anymore.
In San Miguel de los Baños.
And then they start sending pictures of that situation all over Cuba.
And amazingly, without any coordination, it was an explosion.
It means that the Cuban people had it up to here.
They really cannot stand it anymore.
The fact that they don't have medicine, they don't have food.
For the first time, they don't have what to eat.
Before, it was what they call escasez.
You know, you have lack of abundance of food.
But now, they don't have anything.
I mean, I read of this troop, eight hours on a bread line.
Just to get a piece of bread.
Absolutely.
And also, they're beginning to have those shortages of electricity.
So somebody who has a little bit of food in the refrigerator and it would go bad because of this thing, it was an explosion that nobody expected.
I really believe this is the beginning of the end of that regime.
Now the important thing is to be able to re-establish in there the communication.
They will be able to have the internet to communicate.
Would that be one practical thing that a Biden administration could do?
Just superimpose it?
We're capable of doing it.
We're capable of superimposing an internet for the whole island.
Absolutely.
It better be better than what they have.
Absolutely.
We do have the technology.
I remember when I was in Vietnam with the technical service, the CIA had things that nobody knew that we had.
We still do.
Right, and it's the situation here even more.
The problem is that they probably don't want the enemy to know how the technology is going to work.
Carmen, and for you, you've never seen anything like this in your experience as a Cuban-American.
So what do you think this means and how far will it go or can it go?
I think it's something that has happened for the first time.
We have never seen anything even remotely like it.
And I think it, I don't think they can, they have repressed it because they have, we don't know what is happening.
That's the sad story that, you know, they have been very, Very strong in the repression, and because they don't have internet, because that's the first thing that they got back, we have been able to see some things that are horrible, but not the extent to which it has been happening, and so I think it is extremely important for them to have internet, and I know that we have the capability.
We're not asking anybody to go and invade Cuba, but please send internet so that we can see what is happening, and so that the world Can see what is happening there so that they can see that we are with them and that they're not alone, that we're as worried about it as they are and that we're really rooting for them and doing whatever it is in our power to help them.
And the important thing is to stop with internet.
Right now they're not asking for anything else and people always go send remesas, which means send them money and stuff like that.
It goes to the government and we have been able to see the amount of, I mean, Their police is better dressed than the one in the United States.
They have some suits.
That is amazing.
I mean, it looks like a Star Wars movie.
And they have... No, no, really, if you look at them, it's... I'm like, how can this be?
The people don't have anything to eat.
I mean, a lot of these people are obviously very sophisticated people from the city.
A lot of them are just people from the country and the rural people.
It has to frighten the heck out of them.
But they still move ahead.
They still move ahead.
The amount of brand new cars, the amount of brand new buses to bus all these people to come and beat up the, you know, the protesters.
It is amazing the amount of money that they have put into this.
And all that money comes from Miami.
People trying to send money to their relatives.
It has to stop.
They have to say the people want liberty.
They don't want food.
They don't want anything.
Let's just concentrate on getting them internet.
so that we know what is happening, they know what is happening,
and the world can see what it is, and then we can see how to solve it.
But they have been so brave, and you see children getting beat up in the streets,
people getting shot just for standing there and protesting.
As a Cuban-American with the shortages there, would you be in favor of lifting the sanctions?
No way!
The sanctions!
I mean, they're good friends of the Chinese.
Everything that we use comes from China.
Why can't they buy from China?
Why can't they buy from China?
And besides, you know, in their stores, all the frozen chicken comes from the United States.
All the problem is that they get no credit.
Well, if you give them credit, they're not going to pay back.
So why should we, taxpayers in America, pay for what Cuba wants to buy?
Because they want to buy guns with the money that is supposed to go to the people.
It's unfair.
Maxima, from your experience as a warrior, They always make this, I think the lefties do this, they make it all or nothing.
Well, are we going to go to war?
We overthrew something bigger than this, right?
All of Eastern Europe!
The Soviet Union!
Wouldn't fire a shot.
We did it with very, very, a new part of it.
Very crafty, very smart, figure out what they need and irritate them at the right time.
We had to sustain starvation in Russia.
We had to do it.
Worth it now.
People in Poland couldn't go to church.
They weren't able to go to church.
People in Poland can control the education of their own children now.
They couldn't do it.
It was worth it to them to sacrifice.
So what would you do if you could sit down with the president?
Everyone that you had were presidents.
By the way, I have to ask your advice.
They never do it, but... I mean, I would do it if I were the president, even if you're on the other side, because, my goodness, I haven't been there, you have!
But tell me, what are the three or four things that they could do, short of war, or military intervention, that would keep this thing going?
Well, the first thing is definitely open up the communication, no matter what.
First thing, to be able to open the communication.
Second, I think it was a mistake to take the military option out of the table.
They could have said that in the present situation, there is not a possibility of that happening.
But they are sending a wrong message to Cuba.
They feel right now if they start killing people in the street by the hundred, nothing will happen.
How much do you think the fear of Ronald Reagan, or let's go to North Korea with Trump, all those things that Trump would say, that the press would say was crazy, Do you know that I know, because I know North Korea pretty well, that's what kind of moved them to come to the table.
They were afraid it was going to happen.
Absolutely.
And this guy, I mean, they look at him and they're better than I am if they can understand what I'm saying.
See, you have to go in there with a position of strength.
Unfortunately, with this president, they don't have it.
And then what else?
Practical things can we do?
It would be difficult, really.
We have to get the international community involved more to be able to force even these administrators to do something about Cuba.
I think they are looking at what is happening in our homeland, you know, this repression, unprecedented.
The people coming out and express their desire to be free.
You can hear all along that we want to be free.
They don't talk about food.
They don't talk about the vaccines.
Can we dismiss, and I can, but I'm asking you as experts, This whole notion that this is about American sanctions or COVID.
I listened to it for hours because I couldn't stay away from it because it's my people.
And not once did I hear anybody say anything but Libertad.
Abajo el comunismo, which means down with communism, and libertad again.
And a few expletives about Diaz-Canel that I cannot say, but that's all.
That's all they have said.
I have never, in the hours and hours and hours that I have listened to what has come out of there, anything but libertad and down with communism.
They're putting their lives at risk.
They're seen on television with a sign attacking Diaz or a sign attacking Castro, Libertad.
Even the song they're singing, is it in your face?
Because it challenges this slogan of the communist regime.
So, I mean, I've seen this, I saw this, when I saw it in Iran, the first sign that says Ayatollah is a crook, I said this country is moving in the right direction.
That guy's got a lot of guts.
They're going to kill him.
Also, it is ridiculous when they claim that they don't have medicine because of the embargo.
Actually, they can buy the medicine they want in the United States.
But in reality, if they want to get medicine for the Cuban people, they can go to Canada.
They can go to Mexico.
It's much, much cheaper than the United States.
And they can buy it anywhere.
They don't buy it because they don't invest in that.
They invest in their security.
They invest in their security apparatus.
Just think of all the money over the years they invested in foreign Trying to undermine foreign governments.
They spent billions doing that while their people were starving.
A little island getting into the affairs of the whole world.
I can't imagine going through this and somebody not asking your advice.
You can see how invested the Cuban American community is in this, and that's part of our hope.
Despite the fact that we don't have the support from the government that we should have for anti-communism, We got a lot of support among the people.
We've got to have that grow.
We've got to get the information around.
Well, this is our last segment and it'll be with Manolo Reyes.
Let me cover for a second what we've gone over.
I think we've shown that this was a spontaneous demonstration that broke out all over Cuba.
Very unusual.
First time it ever happened.
Just looking at the signs and the communications that our Cuban Americans have had with the people there, this was clearly a revolution.
They wanted to overthrow an oppressive communist government.
What's new about that?
Every communist government in the world has been overthrown by China.
And so that's what's going on.
And the question is, are we going to support it or aren't we going to support it?
We're going to let this moment in time in history to give liberty and freedom to a wonderful group of people.
We're going to let it pass us by.
Or are we going to take advantage of it?
The reality is that you, the American people, don't get all the facts about this.
You never have.
For some reason, and we can spend time examining that some other time, they've romanticized Castro.
They romanticized Che Guevara.
He's some kind of a matinee idol.
These people were homicidal maniacs.
I've been told by Felix, who got to know Guevara, because he commanded the group that killed him, that the guy liked to kill.
He enjoyed it.
That's what his men used to say about him.
So this is what we're dealing with.
And we have a regime now that who knows what they're going to do to these people.
The guy who helped to do the song that's being so popular now is already in jail.
And do we know how many people they've taken away?
I mean, they don't even tell you that, right?
Of course not, because they control the media, Mayor.
Kind of like the Democrats do here.
Exactly like the Democrats here.
And here's the problem.
Believe it or not, now the regime has identified who's the enemy and they put him away.
I will bet you that they're either in jail or dead.
And that's what they do.
They take advantage of the situation.
So, beware.
These people are fighting and claiming and asking and begging for freedom.
That should be a lesson to our young kids at the university.
That should be a lesson to our media, who is not even covering most of this, because they don't want to tell the truth.
And here is the problem.
The biggest problem, how can we help Cuba?
We help Cuba very simply by helping America.
We need to solve our problems in our backyard.
We need to solve the problems in California, in Chicago, in New York.
We need to solve the problem in our schools.
They're brainwashing our kids.
Yes, and part of it is about time.
We need to become healthy.
Once we become healthy, When we have a strong army, once we have a strong police department, once we enforce the laws that exist in our books, then we can help our neighbors.
So what you're saying is we're giving the Cuban communists a very weak example.
We look like a very weak country that could be taken advantage of.
Not like a Reagan or a Trump.
They're allowing the people to blame the embargo.
What embargo?
Have you listened?
Senator Rubio gave a powerful speech.
Listen to what he had to say.
These are facts.
Cuba is not being blockaded by anybody, but by their own regime.
And the people who are blockaded are the Cuban people.
This has gone on for 60 years.
Correct.
All of a sudden, this has gone on for 60 years.
These people trade with all the countries in the world.
They export, they import.
What kind of a blockade?
If you want to blockade, you put ships around the island.
I didn't see a song written about we want vaccines.
Correct.
I think the song that was written is we want liberty.
We want freedom.
We need to show this in our universities.
We need to show this in our high schools.
We need to show this to CNN and NBC and ABC.
These are the people who need to know this.
I think this is where the passion comes from for all of you.
You left Cuba In 1961.
Correct.
On July 4th.
Correct.
This happens to be the anniversary, 68th or 69th anniversary, of when Castro started the revolution.
59th.
62 years ago.
Wow.
So, these are very important days.
What did it feel like, how old were you?
I am now 73 years old.
I've been here since I was 13 years old.
So what did it feel like leaving your home?
You were going to school there.
You had friends there.
It kind of happened pretty quickly.
I mean, Castro comes in, it's about a year, it all boils up.
So you must have had some good years there before that.
What did it feel like leaving your home and never being able to go back?
Cuba was the mecca of America.
Cuba had the same standard of living as the United States.
Cuba has some of the most wonderful education in the world.
So you love the country?
Of course we love the country.
The country you left is not like the country you're leaving now.
People leaving now are getting killed.
You left Because this is like a shock.
All of a sudden, your beautiful country has taken over and it's a place you're gonna get killed.
Mayor, when I left as a young kid, imagine the trauma.
But imagine also the courage of mom and dad.
Oh my goodness.
To send a kid to a country that they didn't know.
To a country that I didn't even speak the language.
What a blessing it turned out to be.
What a vision mom and dad had.
Here's my concluding point.
Here's an observation from an outsider.
Do you and the Cuban-American community, many of you, all the people I talked to today and so many more out there, do you feel this unfinished business?
Absolutely.
Yeah, I bet.
Absolutely.
And what really hurts is to see my country, this country, because I love Cuba because I was born in Cuba.
And so I love Spain because my parents were from Spain.
But this is America.
This is the only country in the world where you can be free.
This is the only country in the world where everybody is dying to come in.
Look at our border.
Look at the Cubans begging for freedom.
Waving the American flag.
What a lesson.
What a lesson to our children.
Those children who are being indoctrinated by people who do not understand that the ends justify the means and that these communists continue lying and making promises that will never be fulfilled.
It will be the opposite.
So, I'll never forget what my father said.
Don't ever lose this country.
Or not.
We've got people like you and the people I talked to today.
You know, in the history of this country, very often we're renewed by new people who come here and understand what we have better than we do.
Because when we live here, we get used to it.
Abraham Lincoln faced this right around the time of the Civil War and he was asked, he had a person that just became a citizen, And somebody whose family came over on a Mayflower.
And the people asked him, kind of like they would ask Jesus, you know, these tough questions.
They said to him, who's the better American?
The guy who's been here for, you know, 200 years is this guy.
He said, well, I don't know.
I'm going to tell you why.
America is not a country that's built on race, religion, ethnic background.
America is built on ideas.
Whoever believes in and understands those ideas better is the better American.
You could have just got sworn in today, or still we could have been here for a hundred years.
And the one thing that the Cuban Americans have brought to us is a renewal of American patriotism, a renewal of what our role is in the world.
If God granted us this freedom, we have the obligation to help other people get it.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And thank all your Cuban compatriots.
Never forget what Mr. Reagan said.
I will never forget it.
He was my hero.
Thank you for joining us at the heart of what I would regard as the Cuban-American resistance.
It's been that way for 60 years, 62 years.
This is, as I said at the beginning, this is the Francis Tavern of the Cuban movement, like it was for our American Revolution.
This is where they come at night, political discussions, all-day political discussions.
There's something special about having had it here.
I hope you learned something from this.
I hope you learned how distorted and how edited and how censored the news you get is on this subject.
And this is not a new phenomenon.
This goes way back to the beginning of romanticizing this murderer, Castro, and his equally homicidal brother, Raul.
These men have killed so many people, it's impossible to count.
They destroyed a great country.
And I'll tell you what they didn't do.
They didn't destroy the desire for freedom in the hearts of these people, or the desire they have to go back and save those left behind.
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