Camagüey, Cuba, Oct 5, 2021 / 16:19 pm (CNA).
Fr. Alberto Reyes Pías, a priest of the Archdiocese of Camagüey, addressed Monday those who have leftist political preferences, asking them to recognize the failure of the socialist model that was imposed on Cuba 62 years ago.
“I understand that you would have liked Cuba to be the model of a successful and functional socialism, but I would be lying if I told you that this is the case. I know it’s hard to see dreams being shattered, and I know how difficult it can be to overcome the stubborn desire to want what is not to be,” Fr. Reyes wrote in an Oct. 4 Facebook post.
“The Cuban model has been a failure, and I humbly ask the Left to end up accepting that, because while you refuse to accept it and boast of continuing to say to a dead person: ‘come on, you can do it,’ my people suffer,” continued the priest.
Protests of the island’s communist government took place across Cuba July 11-12. Protesters cited concerns about inflation, shortages of food and medicine, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Some protesters were beaten, and thousands were arrested.
The island “has been for both the European and the Latin American Left, the dream and the ideal of what has never existed: a successful socialism, a happy and prosperous Marxist-Leninist country, where the people feel at ease and protected, where there are no injustices or miseries, where the poor feel supported and secure, proud of their leaders and confident in the happy and bright future of their children,” the priest said.
“That is what from a well worked out propaganda they asked you to see, and that is what you insist on seeing,” he stressed.
However, the priest said that what his people actually experience is “a life similar to that of nations at war, where everything becomes an exhausting odyssey: food, medicine, transportation, schooling, working conditions.”
“We suffer from the fear of expressing ourselves freely, and the vulnerability of facing a judicial system that convicts and doesn’t allow a defense. We suffer from the uncertainty of a social model where we have practically no control over our present or our future.”
Fr. Reyes said that he would have liked to “say the opposite,” but that “it would be mockery on my part to invite you to live a mirage, beautiful and hopeful, like all mirages, but false and empty.”
“And just as I refuse to mock you, I ask the same of you for my people. Please stop making a mockery of my people, stop mechanically defending a wonderful reality that does not exist. Respect each other and accept that Cuba is not what you would have wanted it to be, and that 62 years is more than enough time to show that it never will be,” he said.
Addressing his readers, he told them that if “you believe that Marxism-Leninism is the solution to the problems of this world, you have every right to seek solutions there, and I will respect you, but do not applaud the failure of socialism in my land with speeches of feigned pride.”
“And if you don’t want to say clearly that we have failed, at least keep quiet, learn to be silent, which can also be a worthy option,” he added.
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Can we rent this priest to come to the US to wake up propagandized leftists and America haters here HERE??? Its badly needed. We have free speech being suppressed everywhere.The January 6th demonstrators are being treated as a genuine threat even though all arrested that day were UNARMED, according to Congressional testimony. Show me an unarmed insurrection and I will show you a ten-legged monkey.The FBI is now raiding NYC Union headquarters because someone there posted “inflammatory” statements. The surest sign free speech is DEAD. Parents wanting to stop their school boards from teaching the bogus CRT to their kids will now be treated as “terrorists” by the Justice dept. Make no mistake, the suppression is here. The only solution is to keep speaking up. And to VOTE like you have some brain cells!!
Some of the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have been charged by prosecutors with assaulting police officers. On videos, we can see police officers that day fighting for their lives in hand-to-hand combat with some of the rioters.
Some of the rioters have been charged with doing millions of dollars of property damage to the Capitol building itself.
Some of the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have been documented on that day threatening the lives of the vice-president and members of Congress.
Do peaceful protesters, people simply exercising their constitutional rights, do they assault police officers, cause millions of dollars of property damage, and make threats against the lives of public officials?
Are those acts that are good, honorable, patriotic, loyal, decent, God-fearing and God-loving?
Yep, left-wingers infiltrate everything, create violence, and the manipulating press get the invincibly submissive to accept their contrived narrative.
Straight talk. Who will listen?
Interesting reference to Marxism-Leninism.
Marxism-Leninism, not just Marxism.
YES, Marxist Socialism in Cuba (and everywhere else) HAS been a failure and catastrophe, and yes, much of the American Left won’t admit this, or maybe they just honestly can’t see it due a sort of blindness induced by their commitment to ideology.
But I respectfully propose that Capitalism in the Caribbean and in Central American nations has also been a failure.
Look at nations such as Guatemala and El Salvador that, with the help of the U.S. military advisors and the CIA, resisted going the Marxist Socialist way.
Would you call what they have in Guatemala and El Salvador to be a success? Human rights, religious liberty, democracy, violent-crime rates, and economic well-being are probably in just a bad state in those nations as they are in Cuba, or maybe even worse.
Conservatives have been telling us for decades that Capitalism always goes hand-in-hand with democracy, peace, religious liberty, and human rights. But we can all see that modern China soundly disproves that.
What is the answer? Maybe Catholics should promote Catholic Social Doctrine.
But in the USA, the Calvinism-dominated Conservative Movement won’t tolerate Catholic Social Doctrine. The main funders and anchors of the Conservative Movement in the USA regard Catholic Social Doctrine–even the interpretation promoted by John Paul II and Benedict XVI–as a dangerous heresy and an economic error that is a close cousin to Marxism and will inevitably lead to full-blown Communism.
About Cuba–I hope and pray that they can peaceably transition to a political and economic system based on Catholic Social Doctrine and Catholic Pro-Life Doctrine.
In part that means Cuba not returning to its pre-Socialism status as a place dominated by casinos, gambling, tawdry nightclubs, American Mafia gangsters and killers, and international crime syndicates.
I hope Cuba can avoid becoming dominated by American culture and American corporations with all of the attendant rampant consumerism (condemned by John Paul II) and the worship and celebration of money, sex, dominance seeking (“libido dominandi” is condemned by St. Augustine) and the liberty without social conscience and without individual responsibility.
I hope Cuba can become morally better than the present-day USA, not just a mirror or an extension or de facto colony of the present-day USA. If evil Socialist Cuba could become good Catholic Cuba, the Church in Cuba could then send missionaries to evangelize the USA.
We should always hope and pray for the good, even if the forces of darkness seem overwhelming, right?
“For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”
Name one single time a conservative equated economic freedom, a God given right, with capitalism. And name one moment in the history of China when economic freedom existed?