My dad was Cuban. He was born in Havana in 1924 and gained his U.S. citizenship by serving in the U.S. Navy during WWII.

When I was young I had an interest in history. It was because of my dad. He had lived through a lot of it. He died when I was nine. But before that he told me of his native country and what had happened after socialism and Castro took over in 1959.

Like America in some ways today, Cuba was not a perfect place in the 1950s. By our standards even then it was a dictatorship. Not a horribly repressive one, as many of the pillars of civil society were outside the reach of the government. It had a free market, but the government was corrupt and rejected pluralism for political oppression. On the world stage it was our ally, which embarrassed the liberal intelligentsia in America who wanted an American-style democracy on the island. So, it was far from a great beacon of freedom. The problem was what came next —Castro’s socialism and then full communism— was much worse.

As a kid I didn’t understand this. So, to make it simpler he told me, “Imagine your home, where you grew up, where you went to school, no longer yours. Think of not being able to go to the grocery store and buy food. Think of your neighbors watching you and reporting anything you say to the authorities. Think of dads and moms being taken away in the middle of the night by the secret police and never coming home again. All that happened in the place I used to call home, where I grew up. We used to say in Cuba, when we thought of socialism and communism, it can’t happen here. But it did. It happened.”

At eight or nine I didn’t understand what he meant. But, looking at the stark choice ahead of us at the polls in November I think I’m understanding more and more of it.

As opposed to an armed revolution as the Cubans did, we’re faced with a political party that holds the loyalty of millions of Americans. It, the Democrats, willingly embraces socialism. Its number two vote-getter in this last primary season, Bernie Sanders, went farther than that and has been pro-communist his entire public career. Its major figures support an armed anarchist and communist insurgency on our streets. And yet, many of us think, it can’t happen here.

The other party is far from perfect and its president has his faults. But it supports a free market, freedom of speech, a pluralistic democracy, and reveres one of the greatest documents ever devised by man: the U.S. Constitution. It makes mistakes —plenty of them— but it stumbles toward trying to make this nation a better place to live.

There’s the choice. Only one can prevail. If the wrong one does we’ll see how it can happen here. In fact, we’ll learn, it can happen anywhere.

This piece was written by David Kamioner on September 5, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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