This year marks the 50th anniversary of my family’s arrival into the United States of America as exiles from Cuba. When the collapse of the Batista regime and the imminent castro victory became a certainty, they began making arrangements to come to the United States. My entire family, save two, chose exile in a foreign land rather than living under communist rule. Most of us arrived in 1960 and the couple of years that followed. At one time there were four generations of my extended family here. We were, and have been, very lucky.
That choice, gut-wrenching as it was for the older generation in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, all of them facing the prospect of losing everything they had worked for their entire lives, was arrived at with relative ease. We were going to the most prosperous country on Earth, a country founded on a set of timeless principles that empower the individual with the liberty to use his or her God-given rights to succeed at anything. The United States had been part of the fabric of Cuban history from before the birth of the Republic in 1902, sometimes for good and others for bad. It was the ideal country of exile for a group of people seeking freedom and the way to provide for their families. There was no question in the minds of my family that America was the best hope, where we would flee to escape the hard tyranny that would turn Cuba into the symphony of ruin it is today.
Our lives here over the last five decades have been productive and generally happy. Thanks to the genius of its founders and our Constitution, we’ve been allowed to thrive and to live our lives, free men and women, as we see fit. The generation of my parents, still wounded from their exile so many decades ago, have adapted and assimilated; my generation, too young to remember Cuba, and those born and educated here, are Americans, through and through. We love this country, not just for the liberty it’s given us, but also for what it truly represents.
Since becoming an American citizen in 1983 I’ve exercised my precious right to vote in just about every election. Yes, I’ve made the occasional error in judgment about candidates I’ve voted for, as we all have. But the one thing I know with absolute certitude is this: I will not sacrifice my conservative principles, the principles of the founders, at the altar of compromise, convenience or expedience again. Ever.
When the last presidential election cycle was in full swing, this blog, and hundreds of others, as well as the real conservative alternative media, rang the warning bells about who Barack Obama was, and what he and the Democrats would do once in power. My then seventy-six year old mother, and others of her generation who came in the first and second Cuban Diasporas, also knew what would happen if the Democrats took control; you see, they’d heard this leftist baloney 48 years before. Even with the overwhelming amount of evidence about Obama, his associations, and his agenda for America that was exposed and written about during the course of the campaign, the “moderates” and the faux conservatives competed with each other to drool and fawn over this “post-partisan,” “post-racial” candidate — the “great unifier” of our troubled nation and the first Black President, to boot! How hip and cool was that? They called us, the li’l ole conservative base, every name in the book for opposing him, his agenda, his philosophy, and his party. We’re all “racists,” don’t ya know.
But it was never about race; it was always about policy.
All the alarm bells at full volume weren’t enough to warn the electorate of the socialist tsunami that would overtake us on November 4, 2008. Obama’s small margin of victory was gleefully ensured by Goebbels-inspired media manipulation and mendacity. The marketing of his “brand,” complete with a logo, combined with sickeningly sycophantic “news” stories in the mainstream media, were just too slick and polished for the easily manipulated, the gullible, the ignorant, and the stupid, to ignore. The voters happily drank the Kool-Aid in big, sloppy gulps, elected Obama by a relatively small margin, and gave the Democrats large majorities in both Houses of Congress.
Mark Levin, in his book Liberty and Tyranny, published in March of 2009, but written before the 2008 campaign, sounded the clearest clarion call about how the statists, collectivists, socialists, progressives, and liberals, would accelerate what he termed a “soft” tyranny, by use of executive orders, directives, legislation, regulation, economic policy, tax policy, etc. This is the war the “progressives” have been waging since the second decade of the Twentieth Century: they are hell-bent on destroying this country, its values, and its founding principles. What all of us predicted would happen, and then some, has come true. The Democrats, and their socialist and marxist allies, have demonstrated they are exactly what we said they were.
It’s been a very long two years.
Unlike the occasional chaos of parliamentary democracies, our republican form of government, devised by a small group of genius revolutionaries over two centuries ago, allows us the attempt to fix things every two years. I can say without any hyperbole that since I voted for the first time many years ago, there has never been a mid-term election as defining and as crucial as the one tomorrow. There have been important choices in the past, to be certain; but tomorrow we will be voting for the very survival of our Republic. WE THE PEOPLE, the tens of millions of us who have had enough, will not be silent any longer.
The choice my family made in those dreadful years of 1958 and 1959 were different than the ones we have before us tomorrow. But don’t be deceived: November 2, 2010 is just as important for the future of this country. Tomorrow’s election may go down in history as one of the greatest expressions of power in a representative republic in the history of the world. WE THE PEOPLE have a choice tomorrow, as Rush Limbaugh said back in late September. That choice is either Obama and the Democrats, or America.
This nation is still the last, best hope of the world, but there’s no exile from here. This is it. Tomorrow morning I will choose America.
