ANALYSIS — Published June 30, 2026 · By Roe Baynes · 12 Min Read
My family didn’t read about communism in a textbook. They lived it, and then they ran from it.
They left Cuba with the clothes on their backs and not much else — abandoning homes, businesses, savings, and the only country they’d ever known, because staying meant living under a regime that owned everything and permitted nothing. They risked their lives to get to a place where a man could speak his mind, own what he earned, raise his family by his own values, and never once fear a knock on the door for any of it. That place was America.
I lead with that because I want to be honest with you about where I’m coming from. This is an analysis piece, not a news report — my opinion is woven all the way through it, and you deserve to know the source of it. When I tell you I believe communism is the single greatest threat this country faces, I’m not repeating a talking point. I’m telling you the thing that sits at the foundation of why I lean right, why I vote the way I vote, and why I’ve spent so much of my life paying attention to this.
And right now, I’m watching the thing my family fled win elections in New York.
What Just Happened
On June 23, three candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America won their Democratic primaries, ousting two sitting House incumbents. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DSA member, beat five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Brad Lander knocked off Rep. Dan Goldman. Claire Valdez took the seat Nydia Velázquez is leaving. (I covered the results in full here.)
President Trump responded the way a lot of us felt. On Truth Social, he wrote that “Communism is the Greatest Threat to our Country since World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11!” At a rally, he mocked how easy the sales pitch is: “I’d be the greatest communist in history,” he said — promise everyone free rent, free food, free housing, and you win. “The problem is, after two or three years, the country is a disaster area. The country fails. They always do.”
He’s right about the sales pitch. I’ve seen where it leads. So let me lay out, plainly, why I see this the way I do.
Why I Don’t Separate Socialism From Communism
A lot of people will tell you democratic socialism is a gentler, friendlier thing — Scandinavia, not the Soviet Union. I don’t buy the distinction, and I’ll tell you why, using the words of the men who built the ideology.
Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin both described socialism not as a destination but as a stage — the first phase on the road to full communism. In their own framework, socialism is the transition; communism is the goal. Marx used the terms almost interchangeably. So when I hear “democratic socialist,” I don’t hear a different ideology. I hear the on-ramp.
I’m not alone in reading it that way. On the House floor last November, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis put it bluntly: “Socialism is communism-lite. Socialism is the first step to communism. Socialism is the antithesis of the American Dream.” That’s the same thing I’m saying, from someone who said it under the Capitol dome.
You can disagree with me here — plenty of thoughtful people do, and I’d rather you read the actual writing of Marx and Lenin and decide for yourself than take my word for it. But that’s the honest basis for why, in this piece, I treat them as one fight.
The Freedoms That Stand Directly Opposed
Here’s what makes me a conservative, and it’s not abstract. Free speech. The Second Amendment. Private property. The family. The right to build a business and keep what you earn. Every one of those things stands in direct opposition to communism — and not by accident.
Watch the pattern when these regimes take power, whether by revolution or by ballot. The guns go first. An armed population is a population that can say no, so disarmament comes early. Then the speech — because a regime that controls everything cannot survive open criticism. Then the property, because the entire premise is that the state, not the individual, owns the means of production.
This isn’t theory to me. In my family’s Cuba, you could not speak freely, you could not own freely, and you could not leave freely. The state decided what you produced, what it was worth, and what you were allowed to want. That’s not a caricature. That’s the testimony of the people who raised me.
The Ratchet: Easy to Vote In, Hard to Vote Out
Here’s the part I most want you to sit with, because it’s the part people underestimate.
It is remarkably easy to vote yourself into socialism. The promises are generous, the targets are unpopular (“the rich,” “the corporations”), and the costs don’t arrive until later. But it is brutally hard to vote yourself back out — because the same movement that wins on free everything tends, once in power, to take control of the courts, the press, and the elections themselves. The door you walked in through gets locked behind you.
If you want to see the ratchet in action, you don’t have to go back to the Cold War. Look at Venezuela. In the 1990s it was one of the wealthiest countries in South America, sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on earth. Then it elected Hugo Chávez — elected, by ballot, on a platform of redistribution and dignity for the poor. Within a generation, the result was collapsed industry, mass starvation, and more than seven million people fleeing the country. And here’s the thing: by the time Venezuelans wanted out of the project, the project wouldn’t let them. The elections were no longer free. The exit door was gone.
Cuba has been locked behind that same door for sixty-six years. My family didn’t get to vote their way out. They had to run.
That asymmetry — easy in, nearly impossible out — is the whole game. It’s why I don’t treat this as just another policy debate where we can try it and reverse course if it doesn’t work. Some things don’t reverse.
From the Fringe to the Front Page
Something has changed in my lifetime, and it’s worth naming.
There was a time, not so long ago, when calling yourself a communist or a socialist in American public life was disqualifying. The label got you ostracized. You did not get elected to anything. The horrors of the twentieth century — the gulags, the famines, the killing fields — were recent enough that the word carried the weight of its body count.
Now watch the line move. First it was Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, running competitively for a major party’s presidential nomination. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the rest of the “Squad.” Then Zohran Mamdani winning the mayoralty of the largest city in the country. And now an entire slate of DSA-endorsed candidates winning primaries in a single night, with the winners being called “the future of the party” by the mayor who backed them.
This is what a moving Overton window looks like in real time. The thing that was unthinkable becomes debatable, then acceptable, then mainstream — and each step makes the next one easier. That progression is exactly what worries me, because I know where the road is supposed to lead. Marx told us where.
Who’s Funding the Mainstreaming
It’s worth following the money, because this shift hasn’t happened on idealism alone.
George Soros and his son Alex have poured roughly $102.8 million into the 2026 midterm cycle so far, according to Federal Election Commission filings — making the family, by a Washington Post analysis of major donors, the single largest individual contributor of the cycle. With months still to go before November, they’re on track to break Soros’s own previous record of $128 million. Almost all of it has flowed through Democracy PAC, the family’s main political vehicle, and it has consistently backed the party’s most progressive figures.
I’ll be careful here, because I run a site that fact-checks for a living: I’m not going to put words in Soros’s mouth or hang a label on him I can’t source. I don’t need to. The documented record — the largest individual donor of the cycle, on pace for a personal record, funding the party’s left flank — speaks loudly enough on its own.
The Counter-Current — And the Opening for Honest Moderates
Now let me do the thing my impartiality pledge requires, and the thing I actually believe is right: give credit where it’s due, including across the aisle.
Not every Democrat is going along with this. Days after the New York results, thirteen moderate House Democrats and candidates, led by Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, launched a pledge called “Promise to America,” declaring flatly: “We’re for capitalism, not socialism. We’re for safety, not lawlessness. We’re proud of America, not ashamed of America.” I want to be clear — I think that took some courage, and I think it’s the right instinct.
This fight didn’t start last week, either. Back in November 2025, Rep. María Elvira Salazar — like me, the child of Cuban exiles — brought a resolution to the House floor “denouncing the horrors of socialism.” It passed 285 to 98, with 86 Democrats crossing over to vote yes. On the floor, Salazar turned to Rep. Maxine Waters and called out her decades of friendly visits to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Waters tried to have Salazar’s words struck from the record rather than answer the charge. Ninety-eight Democrats voted no.
Sit with that split. Eighty-six Democrats were willing to say, on the record, that socialism is a horror. Ninety-eight would not. That tells you the fight is live inside the party — and it tells me there’s an opening. Denouncing communism shouldn’t be a partisan act. It should be the easiest vote in Washington. The moderates who signed the Promise to America, and the 86 who voted with Salazar, are people I’d gladly stand next to on this one issue, whatever else we disagree on. If there’s a path out of this, it runs through honest people in both parties being willing to say the obvious out loud.
Why Capitalism Is the Moral High Ground, Not Just the Practical One
We usually defend capitalism on efficiency — it produces more, it innovates faster. True, but that undersells it. The deeper case is moral.
Capitalism has lifted more human beings out of poverty than any system in the history of the world. Not by a little — by billions. The free exchange of work and goods, under the rule of law and property rights, has done more to feed and house and dignify ordinary people than every utopian scheme combined. That’s not a bumper sticker. It’s the measured record of the last two centuries.
And notice what happens to communism wherever it’s actually tried: it fails, unless it quietly stops being communism. The “successful” examples people point to are the ones that abandoned the pure model. China runs a hybrid — citizens can build businesses and accumulate wealth, so long as the Party keeps its hand on the throat of the economy. Vietnam did something similar. The pattern is unmistakable: communism only stops starving people when it lets a little capitalism in.
Which brings me to the most remarkable admission of all.
Even Cuba Is Admitting It
On June 18 and 19 of this year, Cuba’s own National Assembly unanimously approved 176 free-market reforms — what observers are calling the most sweeping economic overhaul since the 1959 revolution. The package opens the door to private businesses, private banks, private real estate development, foreign investment, and Cubans abroad putting capital back into the island. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said the model was based explicitly on China and Vietnam — communist states that survive only by borrowing capitalism.
Let that land. The regime that defined my family’s exile — the one they fled, the one that took everything — is now quietly conceding that central planning doesn’t work and reaching for the very system it spent sixty-six years calling the enemy. They’re doing it under enormous pressure and out of desperation, and it may be too little, too late. But the admission is the admission. The people who locked the door are fumbling for the handle.
Why I Still Have Hope
I’ll end where I started, with family — mine and the larger one.
For the first time in my life, the Secretary of State of the United States is Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, just like me. He grew up on the same stories I did, carries the same history in the same bones, and he’s running a maximum-pressure policy on the regime my family escaped. I don’t know if a free Cuba is close. I’ve learned to be careful with that hope, because it’s been broken before. But I’ve never seen the pieces line up quite like this — a desperate regime reaching for the market, a U.S. administration pressing hard, and a son of exiles holding the file.
This is why I write about communism the way I do. Not because it’s a useful political club, but because I know exactly what’s on the other side of those free promises — I was raised by people who paid the price to escape them. The good news, the thing I actually believe, is that the fight is winnable. America is still the place my family ran toward. Our job is to make sure it stays that way.
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