50 years after arriving from Cuba, I fear America is falling apart

From our Bureau of Extreme Déjà Vu 

Mike Gonzalez, a Cuban-American writer for the New York Post reflects on the deterioration of American values caused by leftist crusaders.

From The New York Post

This Tuesday marks half a century since I arrived on American shores, and it was love at first sight. Queens felt snug and homey from the start. The country has changed in important ways over the last five decades, in some ways better and in others worse. But America is still very much worth loving.

The fact that today we have two political camps divided by this question — love of America — would have felt strange to the kid who landed at JFK on Aug. 6, 1974, having been born in Cuba and spent two years in Spain with his family waiting for a visa. When that coveted pass finally arrived and we emigrated to New York, I found Jackson Heights full of unending possibilities.

It’s not happenstance that this election year divides us precisely on whether you love America for what it is — the Land of Opportunity, even if it could use some improvements — or if you think it’s hideously racist and oppressive, and seek to transform it. This is the result of a process that I have witnessed firsthand for 50 years and devoted decades to study.

Take the term “Hispanic,” which did not exist 50 years ago and only later did I learn I might qualify as one. That category had not yet been invented by bureaucrats at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It did not happen until 1977 with OMB Directive No. 15, and then was slapped on the Census for the first time in 1980.

I remember my uncle Ramon, who took us in, coming home sometime in the ’70s and informing us that this curious new term, “Hispanics,” was in the works. He was a journalist, one of my mentors and the embodiment of the American Dream, and had heard about this administrative contrivance while working on a story.

We were puzzled. We were Cubans, on our way to becoming Americans, and saw no need to be told to go to a category apart. Sure, we reveled in the fact that both teams in the 1975 World Series had a Cuban player (Luis Tiant of the Red Sox and Tony Perez of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine), but also enjoyed the Autumn Classic for what it was, while mourning that Yogi Berra’s Mets were not in it.

Decades later, as I discerned the threat that this balkanization represented to the American Way of Life — which, after all, had beckoned us here — and I began to research the subject, I found out exactly what had happened.

Leftist activists, the same ones who laid waste to my native island under Fidel Castro, had forced initially reluctant administrators to create the category of Hispanics.

Why? The Left realized that you must create a never-ending slew of special-interest groups, and then make them feel they’re marginalized, so they’ll sign up for the transformative revolt.

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