The Latino community in the U.S. has its roots and its heart in two worlds: Latin America and the United States of America. Traditional values such as the importance of family, religion, hard work, individual freedom, respect for elders, and a love of country rank high in the lives of most Latinos.
They also carry a fundamental understanding, having watched the ups and downs of life in Latin America, of the competing impulse to have cradle to grave security, provided by a powerful government, versus the impulse to take charge of one’s own life and the life of their family, to pursue individual dreams without the heavy hand of government determining their fate.
Latin America is generally thought of as 20 countries from four different categories. South America has 10 nations, Central America has six, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama; the Caribbean has three, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti, while Mexico is a category of one.
The United Nations and the World Bank include all Caribbean nations as part of Latin America, finding there to be 33 nations that fit in that world. While each country has its own unique history and characteristics, including forms of government that have undergone many changes and cycles, three nations stand out as providing an overview of countries that have flirted with, or gone all the way with socialism and communism, providing us lessons on the relationship between those forms of government and personal freedom to control one’s life and destiny.
Those three are Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
As we are in the thick of a heated campaign for control of the U.S. House and Senate for the next two years, socialism has assumed a central role, as dozens of Democratic candidates are either members of the Democratic Socialists of America or are endorsed by them.
So what is wrong with that? And how does that apply to those three countries? Many would like us to believe that socialists, democratic or otherwise, just want to see everyone have cradle-to-grave healthcare, free or quite inexpensive housing, free childcare, education, transportation, and food, regardless of their motivation and desire to work hard, move up the economic ladder, get married, and have a family.
But it’s what comes with socialism that are the lessons to be learned from those three countries. It comes, inevitably, with a loss of personal freedom, free speech, and freedom to criticize the government. It comes with shortages at the grocery store, the gas station, of reliable electricity, clean water and good cell phone coverage.
When government assumes the power to direct economic life, it necessarily takes choices away from individuals. That is not a regrettable side effect. It is the central problem with the promise.
Socialism is about public ownership or political control of the means of production, not simply a safety net within a market economy. The distinction is important: helping people through hard times is not the same as giving political authorities command over their livelihoods.
The conflict over control of our destiny begins with a simple question: Who decides? Can individuals own businesses, choose their work and invest their savings independently, or must those choices be part of an official plan? If officials have the final say, individual freedom has already been reduced, and that is before anyone is arrested.
It’s not just about economics. When government becomes the main source of employment, resources and opportunity, resisting it can threaten a person’s livelihood. A constitutional right to criticize becomes much harder to exercise when the institution being criticized also controls the means of supporting a family.
Start with Venezuela. Hugo Chávez was president there from 1999 to 2013. His legislative allies expanded the Supreme Court from 20 seats to 32 in 2004, which had the effect of negating any measures put forward by a newly elected opposition legislature to undo the authoritarian laws and structure imposed by Chavez after his death in 2013, according to Human Rights Watch.
That led to the destruction of an independent restraint on power, leading to perhaps an even more repressive and authoritarian regime under Nicolas Maduro, who is now awaiting trial in a U.S. prison after he was removed from power by a U.S. military operation this past January.
Nicaragua is another example of the promise of socialism versus the reality. Its 2018 crackdown on protests left more than 300 people dead, according to the Congressional Research Service. Between April 2018 and August 2024, the Ortega government canceled the legal status of more than 5,000 nongovernmental organizations, including groups working in health care, religion, education and human rights.
Cuba is perhaps the most familiar story to Americans, as it became the central story in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Since Fidel Castro seized power in the island nation some 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the country has remained under communist rule for more than 65 years.
While Castro has long been viewed by leftists in the U.S. and particularly in the media as an admirable revolutionary, the truth is something far different. He and his successors have brought shortages, repression and misery to most of the population, with many risking raft rides through shark-infested waters to find freedom in Florida, Texas and beyond.
Many Cubans entered under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which allowed those who reached U.S. soil without visas to remain and pursue legal status.
The lesson is not that every government regulation leads to dictatorship, but rather that socialist economic command carries an unavoidable restriction of individual choice and creates a structural danger to the freedoms that make resistance possible. Concentrating economic and political authority means asking the same institution to direct our lives and respect our refusal to cooperate.
The lesson to draw from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua is not that we should care less about one another. It is that a society cannot place economic decisions in political hands without limiting personal freedom. And no political promise is worth making the individual powerless before the state.
Approximately 470,000 Texas residents are of Cuban (225,000), Nicaraguan (43,000) or Venezuelan (200,000) origin combined, based on estimates from Pew Research. That includes immigrants and U.S.-born people with family origins in those countries, not just people born there.
With those sorts of numbers of people who should have direct knowledge or an inherited memory of the lives left behind in Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela, Texas stands as the wall between those selling a socialist vision in the U.S. versus those who recognize the benefits of economic and political freedom enshrined in our Constitution.
This column was published at Texas Latino Conservatives
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
