At a recent gathering on the Capitol steps, a group of former residents from Cuba, Venezuela, the former Soviet Union and China shared personal testimonies of life under communist rule. Their stories illustrate how state control over economics, education and religion can erode the very foundations of family and faith.

Personal accounts of oppression

José Daniel Ferrer, who spent more than a dozen years in Cuban prisons, described systematic physical and psychological torture, as well as widespread malnutrition. He said the regime’s promises of equality masked a plan to concentrate power and silence dissent.

Daniel Di Martino recalled his middle‑class life in Venezuela before the Bolivarian Revolution. After the government took control, grocery shelves emptied, meat and milk vanished, and citizens were forced to scan fingerprints to determine what they could purchase. “When the state controls food, employment and housing, you cannot feed your family without the bureaucrat’s permission,” he said.

Faith under attack

Mike Gonzalez, who grew up in 1970s Cuba, recounted being harassed for attending church and pressured to join the communist youth organization. At age eleven, he was interrogated by regime agents. “Communists try to control schools because they want to control the message,” he explained, noting that religious practice was portrayed as a threat to state authority.

Pastor Ezra Jin, a Chinese pastor released after U.S. diplomatic intervention, described how he and twenty other church leaders were arrested for worshipping outside the party’s control. While the Chinese Constitution formally guarantees religious freedom, the Communist Party places itself above the law, leaving believers vulnerable.

Implications for America

The survivors argue that the same patterns—government seizure of private property, restriction of free speech, and suppression of religious practice—are evident in contemporary calls for “democratic socialism” in the United States. They warn that policies that concentrate economic power or limit parental rights to direct their children’s education echo the incremental controls they experienced abroad.

These testimonies serve as a reminder that constitutional protections of free enterprise, religious liberty and family autonomy are essential safeguards against any system that seeks to place the state above the individual.

Original reporting: Fox News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.