What I carried from Cuba, and what I found in the United States of America. Sometimes it feels that I am carrying many heavy reflections shaped by my personal journey of arriving in my new nation and watching folks struggle. It is completely exhausting to watch ordinary people, both back in Cuba and working-class families here at home, bear the brunt of rigid political ideologies while just trying to survive the day-to-day grind.
My connection between these struggles and the rise of social democracy makes a lot of sense. When people feel squeezed by extreme systems, whether it’s the suffocating economic stagnation of Cuba's rigid state control or the widening wealth gap and mounting bills in a hyper-capitalist system, every day citizens naturally start looking for a middle path.
Social citizens try to build that bridge. Rather than dismantling the whole system, they focuses on putting guardrails around it to protect ordinary citizens. That bridge should be built on a few core ideas such as Insulating Basic Needs:
First, that things like healthcare, quality education, and stable housing shouldn't be treated as luxuries or left entirely to market forces.
Secondly, that a Regulated Economy must allow private enterprise and businesses to thrive, and by using taxes and regulations to fund a robust social safety net so working-class families don't fall through the cracks.
Thirdly, that Preserving Democracy is of paramount importance. Unlike authoritarian communist regimes, like the present incarnation of GOP which is building a wall of fear, a Social Democracy must rely strictly on free elections, free speech, and its democratic institutions to make positive changes.
It seems evident that when the daily reality for millions becomes a choice between paying for medicine or keeping the lights on, policies that promise basic security and a fair shot tend to gain a lot of traction. Thau a direct response to the feeling that the current system is leaving too many people behind while a select few thrive.
I was a boy who didn't speak a word of English the day my family turned its back on communism and walked away from everything we owned. We didn't leave because we stopped loving Cuba. We left because love wasn't enough to keep a family fed, safe, and free to speak its mind.
America took us in. I learned the language, then I learned what the language was for speaking up, asking difficult questions, telling people the truth even when it was inconvenient. Years later, that calling brought me to Washington, where I served as the News Division Chief at the United States Information Service under President George H.W. Bush. In 1990, I was part of the team that helped launch TV Martí, a broadcast service built on one simple, stubborn idea: that the people of Cuba deserved uncensored news and a window to the outside world, no matter what their government wanted them to see.
That instinct ran in the family before it ever ran in me. My godfather and uncle, Osvaldo Soto, joined the Bay of Pigs in 1961 as a member of Assault Brigade 2506. When that mission failed, he didn't stop fighting, he just changed weapons, earning his law license in Miami, Florida and co-founding the Spanish American League Against Discrimination, known as #SALAD. He spent the rest of his life forcing South Florida's institutions to look like the community they served, including the campaign that gave SALAD its enduring motto: "Vota Para Que Te Respeten", vote, so that you'll be respected. Last year, Miami-Dade County renamed its new courthouse the Osvaldo N. Soto Miami-Dade Justice Center in his honor, the first Florida courthouse named for someone of Hispanic descent. He never stopped believing that the ballot box, not the battlefield, was where dignity was won.
I carried a version of that belief into my own reporting. As part of "Second Sunday" an award-winning documentary series on NBC and "The Source, a young-adult-themed radio network. I traveled to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, an abandoned Army post turned holding camp for thousands of Cubans who'd arrived during the 1980 Mariel boat-lift under the Carter administration. I went there to cover a story. I came home having met my father-in-law, one of the men being held behind that fence, waiting to find out if this great nation would take him in next. He, like so many of the Cubanos I met on that assignment, arrived penniless and stayed anyway, building a life from nothing, with a fierce respect for the chance he'd been given and no patience for self-pity about how hard it had been to get it aboard rafts or life boats.
I think about both of those men often, not because the politics of the moment have stayed the same, but because the lesson underneath their stories hasn't changed at all. Whether a government is choking off information in Habana or two political tribes here at home are shouting past each other instead of listening, the people caught in the middle are the same people: working families just trying to get through the week.
That's the thread that connects everything I see today. I've lived and worked in New York, Texas, Indiana, Georgia and California, places where politics looks almost nothing alike, where a Republican in one state and a Democrat in another would disagree about nearly everything except one thing: the bills keep climbing, and paychecks don't stretch the way it used to.
A recent Siena University poll put a number on what I've felt anecdotally for years. Fifty-three percent of New York voters named cost of living their single biggest worry, and 77 percent ranked it among their top two concerns. What struck me most wasn't the size of that majority, it was its shape. At least 72 percent of every group surveyed agreed: Democrats and Republicans, independents, upstaters and downstaters, men and women, young and old, Black, Latino and white voters alike. In a country that argues about nearly everything, that's about as close to unanimous as it gets.
I don't think the answer to that kind of squeeze is found at either extreme. I watched what rigid state control did to my nation of birth, it didn't protect ordinary Cubans, it just gave them one set of masters instead of many choices. I don't believe the answer here is to tear down the system that gave my family the opportunity to build a life from nothing, either. What I do believe, and what I think a growing number of Americans across the spectrum are quietly realizing, is something gentler and more practical: a country can let enterprise thrive and still decide, together, that health care, education and a roof over our heads shouldn't depend entirely on luck or leverage. That's not a betrayal of the American idea. It might just be the most American idea there is, a people deciding, through free and independently run elections and free speech, to take care of each other without giving up an inch of liberty to do it.
I didn't come to this country to import an ideology. I came because this country offered something Cuba couldn't: the freedom to disagree out loud, and the decency to still call each other neighbors afterward. That's the freedom my uncle was prepared to fight for at the Bay of Pigs and then dedicated a lifetime building, vote by vote, in Miami. It's the same freedom I helped broadcast toward Cuba from Washington, DC. And it's the same freedom I'd ask all of us to extend to one another now, Republicans, Democrats, independents, new arrivals, or native-born.
Love and determination still beat fear and division. They did the day my family landed here with nothing, and they still do today. Don't be afraid of your neighbor. Offer the same welcome this country once offered a boy who couldn't yet speak the language because somebody, somewhere, is still waiting to learn that lesson is true to life.
May God bless America and all those who are willing to work endlessly to continue to unite our divided States.
