The men who fled these socialist regimes have a terrifying warning
In the midst of sunshine and a summer breeze, in the land of the free and home of the brave, sit three men, all immigrants who fled their "Third World" countries running on the "nightmare" of socialist policies.
"The record in my city was once that we ha[d] three days long without electricity. There were shortage[s] of water like every day. … It's a disaster," Emmanuel Rincón, who fled Venezuela in 2017, told Fox News Digital.
"If you live in the USA … you are never going to experience that, and you're never going to be able to understand that.
"I have spent almost all my life under the Chavismo [Hugo Chavez] rule, and my family were always in opposition of the regime. So, I always understand the nightmare that socialism is."
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"In Cuba, there is no water, no electricity, no freedom, no food, no salary, no clothes, no shoes, nothing," Eliécer Ávila, a Cuban immigrant living in Florida who fled the island in 2017 said.
"And the little that there is is what [families living in the U.S.] send from here."
Ávila and his family were heavily censored, and they were fired from their jobs and banned from Havana, the capital of his home island, after a video was leaked to the BBC of him asking a series of "uncomfortable questions" to Ricardo Alarcón.
Alarcón is the former minister of foreign affairs in Cuba who was, at the time, the president of the national assembly of the country.
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"I was persona non grata inside the capital in my own country. From there, I started a movement of young people and students that were pro-democracy … which put me in jail more than 40 times," Ávila shared.
During that time, he was invited to a Latin American Studies Association (LASA) event with activists and human rights defenders from around the world.
"After I came back [from that trip], the dictatorship didn’t let me enter back in, and they put me in one of the 50 most wanted terrorists. Me, who doesn’t even have a traffic violation, just because I wanted freedom for Cuba," he said.
Gene Maine, an immigrant who escaped the Soviet Union with his mother in 1981, expressed a similar sentiment.
"[Growing up] I started noticing that all the propaganda on TV — the two channels that we had — didn't look right. It seemed like it was a lie. We grew up in what turned out to be the Third World," Maine said.
"All the trumpeting on the street of how great this is, how this is the best, how evil America is, how evil Western Europe is and how evil capitalism is. People realized that they couldn't speak freely.
"There was no religion. The only religion allowed was communism, which is a religion. Let's not have any doubts about it. It is a religion, it replaces Christianity, Judaism. That's the environment I grew up in," Maine said.
"These are not only dictators. They are also narco-terrorists. These are really dangerous people," Rincón added about Venezuela.
"I ha[d] to take out all my family from Venezuela. This is my history, but there are millions of histories like this in Venezuela. These are the things that the people in the USA (don't) really understand about socialism."