The above picture is from the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Miami on a recent trip. A Cuban family brought me to this museum, and it was one of the most spectacular and historically-accurate museums I have ever visited. I learned a lot about fortitude in the priesthood there. This will hopefully be demonstrated in this article.
Upon entering, I was surprised to see ¡Viva Cristo Rey! at the entrance to the Cuban museum. I wasn’t only surprised to see a promotion of Christ in a seemingly-secular museum, but also surprised because I thought ¡Viva Cristo Rey! was the exclusive war cry of Mexican Catholics in the Cristero Wars of Mexico of the 1920s. One thing we can learn from this is that true Catholics of any nationality will fight for Christ to be King of their nation. This reveals that the Sovereign Reign of Christ the King is not just about hoping for a pipe-dream of a Catholic monarchy soon, but that we must suffer for the truth of Christ’s reign even today in a post-Christian country, like the USA or Cuba or Mexico.
Before getting to this museum, I obviously knew the Soviets sent Fidel Castro to Cuba to destroy it. I knew Castro was super evil. But I didn’t know he was sent to the richest and most advanced island in the Caribbean in order to commandeer it for Marxists to get rich. Before his coup, say, in the year 1940, Havana was much more advanced in culture, health and government than even Miami as you can see in the statistics above. What this means is that Communists always target rich areas to turn them poor, as one of my hosts from Venezuela (another rich land turned communist) explained to me.
Among the first that Fidel Castro killed were the serious Catholics. As in all Marxist regimes, the real Catholics and the intellectual Catholics have to be killed first. Above, you can see Franciscan priests holding a crucifix to the lips of a man condemned to death by the firing squads of Fidel Castro. Again, I knew Castro was evil, but I had no idea the level of torture and killing he brought to the island of Cuba until I went to this museum. Cuba became the Cambodia of the West with its killing fields.
I probably wouldn’t read the above letter if I were just skimming my blog post with many other things to read today. But I’m going to ask you to read it. Many of the men sent to the firing squads were given 20 minutes to prepare for death and send a letter to their families. These letters literally brought me to tears. What was common among many of them was two things: 1) They knew why they were dying, and they were even honored to die for Christ and their country (patria in Cuban Spanish, repeatedly through the museum.) 2) The condemned man’s only concern was that his family left behind keep the Catholic faith and the sacraments, as you can see in the above letter.
The above is a real letter saved by the museum. It was written by a man before Fidel Castro’s regime killed him. Notice he is a traditional Catholic and a true patriot until his last breath: ¡Viva Cristo Rey! (“Long live Christ the King!”) and ¡Viva Cuba Libre! (“May Cuba be free!”) As in, may Cuba be free of this terror of Marxism. And those two phrases obviously meet up in the message of Fatima. Keep in mind Mary has been appearing on earth for 2,000 years. But Fatima is the first I am aware of where she condemns a political system, namely, “the errors of Russia” that would destroy nations and send millions to hell. Yes, this Cuban museum is exactly where the Americas meet the message of Fatima with how many Catholics were killed and the true faith was stolen from that country.
The above picture is a priest preparing a Cuban man for his death. The man was condemned to die by firing squad by Fidel Castro, probably in the 1950s.
Notice in the lower right part of the above picture is a group of nuns who Castro extradited to the United States. That’s because his attempts to infiltrate the clergy and religious congregations failed at liberalization. Amazingly, this seemingly-secular museum in Miami as these astonishing words about what Castro tried to do to the Catholic Church in Cuba:
At first the government tried to create an organization of revolutionary Catholics within the Church. But the failure of these efforts led the new government to increase its rhetoric against the Church and warn religious leaders not to meddle in public affairs. Hours before the landing at the Bay of Pigs, the government unleashed a wave of mass arrests across the country. All the priests were retained in their homes and guarded. All the facilities of the Catholic organizations were closed and occupied. During the following weeks, the foreign priests were ordered to leave the country. No law was issued in this regard, but all were visited by regime officials to verbally communicate the expulsion. Two months later, in June 1961 some 350 Catholic schools and 100 Protestant schools were nationalized, along with two Catholic Universities and one Protestant one. Approximately 3,000 priests, nuns and religious workers were immediately homeless and jobless and forced to leave the country, sent by their superiors to other countries in Latin America or Europe.
It’s no wonder the current Vatican apparatus (since 2013) has been occupied by Marxist liberation theologians who have been open friends with the genocidal maniac Fidel Castro. The infiltration is complete upon the Central Nervous System of the Catholic Church, as traditional Catholics all across the globe are now being treated the same way as you read Castro’s regime sent true Catholic priests and nuns packing in Cuba in the 1960s. But again, now it’s global because South American Marxists have fully captured the Chair of Peter.
In Miami this week, I met the daughter of a good Cuban man killed by Castro’s firing squads. In fact, there was a picture of him at the museum on the wall of the dead in the Cuban museum I visited. I put a square around his face in the above picture. Eternal rest, grant unto your heroes, Oh Lord, and may the Perpetual Light Shine upon them.
A movie called Los Plantados was featured in the Cuban Museum in Miami. It’s about the prisoners under Communism who were so intractable in the prison camps that they would neither wear a prison uniform, nor do prison labor nor go to “re-education camps.” As you can imagine, the punishments were severe. Some of them were physically and psychologically tortured by the communists on the island of Cuba at prisons (and there were hundreds of such prisons) for up to 30 years! As it says above, they were denied family visits, nutrition and health care.
I have suffered for the truth in my life, but not as much as these men and women. What I learned in the above Cuban museum as a traditional priest being persecuted under modernists is that God may required many more years than we could have ever expected. It’s not that God sends us the evil of Marxism or “liberal Catholicism” to destroy souls, but that God may expect great things like a short-red or a long-white martyrdom. This may be for the few to prove their love for Christ under the many leading these regimes of atheism, death and liberalism.
