RealClearPolitics:
Maximo Alvarez, whose family fled Communist Cuba, delivered a passionate speech against Marxism at the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention. Alvarez, a Florida businessman gave an emotional speech about the consequences of swallowing the “communist pill” and said that it is “up to us to decide our fate, and to choose freedom over oppression.” Read the transcript of his entire speech below.
“I’m speaking to you today because I’ve seen people like this before,” Alvarez said Monday. “I’ve seen movements like this before. I’ve seen ideas like this before and I’m here to tell you, we cannot let them take over our country.”
“I heard the promises of Fidel Castro. And I can never forget all those who grew up around me, who looked like me, who could have been me, who suffered and starved and died because they believed those empty promises. They swallowed the communist poison pill,” Alvarez said.
“Those false promises — spread the wealth, free education, free healthcare, defund the police, trust a socialist state more than your family and community — they don’t sound radical to my ears. They sound familiar,” he said.
“The country I was born in is gone, destroyed,” Alvarez said at the RNC. “When I watch the news in Seattle and Chicago and Portland, in other cities, when I see history being rewritten, when I hear the promises, I hear echoes of a former life I never wanted to hear again. I see shadows I thought I had outrun.”
