Americans need to be aware before it’s too late. Many aren’t heeding it.
And now a huge warning about a rising threat is putting Americans on edge.
As self-described democratic socialists rack up primary wins across the country, a handful of expats who fled socialist and communist governments in Venezuela, Cuba and the Soviet Union are offering blunt, firsthand warnings about where those promises actually lead — rationing, fear, and a government that decides who gets to eat.
Their accounts arrive at a pointed moment, as the Democratic Socialists of America’s brand of politics gains ground in Democratic primaries from Michigan to New York City, and as the movement’s American defenders describe their vision in far gentler terms than the people who actually lived it.
‘There Is No Democratic Socialism’
Emmanuel Rincón, who escaped Venezuela in 2017 after living under the country’s socialist system his entire life, rejects the softened American framing outright. “They like to call [it] democratic socialism, [but] there is no democratic socialism, because the main incentive of socialism is to take the money and take what the people have legitimately earned and give it to some people that have never worked,” Rincón told Fox News Digital. “That is not democratic in [any] way.”
The Democratic Socialists of America describes its vision as one where “ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.” Rincón’s lived experience tells a different story: waiting 18 to 20 hours in line for gasoline under a heavily regulated system, and routine trips to the grocery store that ended in nothing. “We could go to the grocer[y store] to buy meat and eggs or milk or whatever… but we wouldn’t be able to find meat or milk, or bread… and you have to make lines for 6, 12 hours only to try to buy something,” he said. “It’s really that bad. It was only because of the mismanagement of the socialist administration.”
A Cuban Exile’s Warning: Appreciate What You Have
Eliécer Ávila, forced to flee Cuba in 2017 after criticizing the regime’s impact on ordinary Cubans, argues that people who’ve actually escaped socialist dictatorships tend to value American freedoms more than those who’ve never had to live without them. “Cubans, Venezuelans, Latinos, who lived in dictatorships and who managed to live in democracy, have to appreciate it a lot… Every time I talk to the Americans themselves, I think that I love the United States more than those who were born here, because they have no point of comparison,” he said.
Pressed on what he’d say to a room of American socialists, Ávila offered a thought experiment flipping the script on Trump critics, describing a hypothetical strongman government that bans the opposition party, shuts down critical media, and imprisons dissenters: “Imagine [he banned] the Democratic Party on the first day and all the others. That he closed all leftist media outlets… everything. That nobody could criticize Trump because they’d get 30 years in prison, be shot or exiled. Imagine you could only have a car, phone or passport if you’re a Trump supporter. Would you agree with that, Democrat?” He answered his own question: “I’m sure that 100% of you would say, ‘[I’d] take up arms against him.’ So, [maybe] now you can understand me.”
A Soviet Escapee Sees The Same Playbook Resurfacing
Gene Maine, who fled the Soviet Union in 1981, frames the current moment as part of a longer campaign to erode Americans’ trust in their own institutions from within rather than confront the country directly. “There’s a lot of evil forces in the world that do not want America to succeed. And they’ve realized very early on actually, that America cannot be defeated from the outside — it’s too strong — but it can be defeated from the inside,” he said, describing generational efforts at “demoralizing the population, removing trust in the institutions, like elections, like courts.”
Maine’s bottom line for Americans weighing the socialist pitch is simple: someone always pays. “There is no such thing as free lunch,” he said. “[People are] starting to understand [that] when [the] government that offers you everything can also take everything away.”
Their warnings land as prominent Democrats themselves have begun pushing back publicly on the party’s leftward drift — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear recently called socialism a “failed experiment” even as polling shows rank-and-file Democrats increasingly viewing it more favorably than capitalism, a split that suggests the debate these expats are trying to inject into American politics is only getting started.
