Whether it’s brutal roundups in the midst of the “unprecedented,” as both Buck and Clay declared, Cuban uprising today for freedom, or vivid memories of firsthand brutalization decades ago, C&B’s Cuban-American callers flooded the phone lines to reveal their dramatic stories.
On the radio show and their buzzing social media accounts, C&B asked Cuban-Americans to share with the country their personal experiences. And past or present, one sentiment was clear: Horror.
Joelle in North Carolina, who has been in the United States for 21 years and said all of her family is still in Cuba, has been receiving alarming news from family and friends regarding today’s freedom fight that she had not heard about in the media.
“I received a few videos from friends and family in Cuba and I saw in their videos that the people, the Castro people, they’re not wearing any uniforms right now. They’re using civil — like regular clothing — and they are knocking on doors, arresting people over there. In Santiago, Cuba, I’m hearing there are already people that were killed there.”
The tale from Sergio in Port St. Lucie, Florida, illustrates that horror may be on display today in Cuba, but its tentacles reach back decades. His father fought in the Bay of Pigs and, in fact, became a pawn in what was a web of real-life nightmares.
“My father was put in a truck and tortured with no air, and with a belt buckle he opened a little hole in the truck to be able to breathe out. He was tortured every day and finally he was traded for medicine.”
Sergio could link the atrocity chain to the events of today’s historic uprising, echoing Joelle with what his Cuban friends and relatives have relayed to him.
“The shooting at unarmed people,” he lamented. “They’re going house to house arresting people. When they arrest them it ain’t they put you in jail, they beat the living daylights out of you and then put you in jail. I mean, it’s sad. The good thing is people are now starting to see what’s going on over there. It’s the old type of communism that they really don’t care about anything.”
This echoed Buck’s earlier declaration, “This is REAL communism, folks!”
Both C&B had been querying the callers about the thing they most wanted to know, as Clay asked Sergio, “What, in your mind, should the American government do?”
“People want freedom there. And as long as the United States allows Russia to protect them, it’s gonna continue,” was Sergio’s wise reply.
Joelle, with urgency in her voice answered, “It should be a wake-up call for the American people living here that we really need some help. The government, the United States government should help those people because people are starving there. They’re dying from starvation there in Cuba, and now they — this is the time, I would say, at 49 years old, this is the ‘Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans’ I have never seen. I have never seen that many people on the street.”
Joe in Austin replied that, if the United States wants to invade someplace, “let’s start with Cuba! It’s 90 miles away. Let’s start there. It’s a mess.”
He tied up the terror timeline by saying all of this started “way before 1959.” And his own tormenting was well underway as a 4-year-old.
“I came to the United States in ’64. And when my dad tells me in Cuba that we were going to America, my sister and I, we got so excited that we decided to make a kite, and we flew the American flag. They were there in 10, 15 minutes, trying to arrest me, trying to arrest my sister.”
The latest articles are echoing what C&B callers already heard. As Clay said, “Updated article just came down, Wall Street Journal, about arrests in Cuba. They have particularly cracked down on well-known dissidents and civil rights activists — and some people may know these names — visual artist Luis Manuel Otero, poet Mari Pochacho. And if I’m killing — mispronouncing some of these names — Jose Daniel Ferrer, the leader of Cuba’s most important opposition group. Human rights organization and dissident groups, they’re all being arrested and thrown into prison right now, and security forces are taking over in an unprecedented manner right now across all of Cuba, according to the most updated stores coming out.”
Clay stressed he is grateful for firsthand dispatches from C&B’s own family of Cuban-American callers since, as the listeners noted, the internet and other sources are being censored in Cuba, and Clay said, even U.S. media, due to lack of sympathy, will only tell part of the story. He said, if not for our informed callers, “This crackdown is gonna get ugly and we’re gonna hear about 5% of it!”