09 Dec Opinion: The Nature of Evil
By,
Andrés Alburquerque, Senior Fellow, MSI²
Necessary foreword
Spurred by the crushing defeat we suffered in the New York mayoral elections, I have resolved to expose, through a series of three articles, the true face of communism in Cuba. I will examine how, with scarcely five percent of the popular vote, the communists succeeded in seizing the island and holding it in what appears to be an eternal bear hug. My analysis draws heavily on the indispensable “Soviet Cuba” by my friend César Reynel Aguilera, as well as on my own childhood memories of growing up within a communist household. In approaching this task, I have endeavored to be as meticulous and unsparing as possible.
When Ronald Reagan warned the world about an “evil empire,” he was not speaking metaphorically. He was naming a force that had already carved up half of Europe, suffocated entire nations, and wrapped its hands around the throats of millions. But even Reagan’s warning barely scratched the surface.
Because communism, like socialism and all the lesser “isms” in the same ideological family, was never merely a political system. It was a delivery mechanism, a weaponized narrative, a tool forged and wielded by forces far older, far quieter, and far more calculating than the noisy apparatchiks who paraded across Red Square or Havana’s Revolution Square, for that matter.
These ideological movements have always fed on manipulation, selective truths, and outright lies. They thrive on the seduction of failure, on the romanticism of perpetual struggle, permanent revolution, and endless grievance. They promise a utopia just beyond reach, but the road always ends at the same destination: subjugation, poverty, and ruin.
And yet the disaster is not a flaw. It is the point. A populace drowning in crisis becomes a mass easy to steer.
We are told that socialism wages war against “the ruling class.”
But this is a tactical distraction.
Historically, the so-called “rich” are convenient cash cows, drained to fund the machinery until they are hollowed out and discarded. After that, the system moves on to its real objective: the destruction of the individual, the erasure of autonomy, the dismantling of communities, identities, and cultures until nothing remains but a mass of people trained to wait for instructions.
The real enemy of these systems has never been wealth. It has been self-sufficiency, dignity, and independence.
The free human mind. To break humanity, one must first break its will.
Behind every ideological movement there exists a tiny cluster of individuals, few in number, unremarkable in appearance, but immeasurably powerful in influence. They possess the single greatest weapon on earth: anonymity.
No titles, no open thrones, no public profiles to attack.
In their place, they appoint a legion of lieutenants, airbrushed, immaculately groomed, flying private jets to conferences where they rehearse the movements of power like actors reading lines. These lieutenants appear to rule, but they do not. They execute. And they obey. Because the true architects are merciless, they brook no defiance. Their appetites are insatiable, and their reach is generational. They operate not by seizing power openly, but by shaping the world so thoroughly that power always flows back to them, no matter who seems to hold office, no matter which ideology claims the spotlight.
The common saying that “the inmates have taken over the asylum” misses the truth entirely. The inmates never took the asylum. They built it.
Communism was never meant to last forever. It was a tool, a vessel for harvesting resources, reshaping societies, and disrupting the global order.
When it became cumbersome, when it began to collapse under its own contradictions, when it risked exposing the hands behind it, it was quietly euthanized. Not defeated by the triumph of freedom, merely replaced, like a broken instrument in a workshop full of replacements.
In its place emerged a splintered and destabilized world:
• rogue regimes jostling for leverage
• extremist movements rising and falling like tides
• new ideological hybrids emerging, each more volatile than the last
• alliances forming and dissolving at breakneck speed
This was not randomness. This was design. A fractured world is easier to manage. A chaotic world cannot unify. A divided people never look upward to see the puppeteers.
The modern left, radical, enraged, ideologically intoxicated, believes itself to be the tip of the spear. But it is only a spear someone else forged.
Yes, their disdain for ordinary people is real. Yes, they are dangerous when confident. Yes, they willingly become the foot soldiers of movements that promise salvation but deliver devastation.
But they are not the architects. They are instruments, reliable, repeatable, effective for certain uses, and then replaced when no longer useful.
The real strategy is not ideological.
It is structural, universal, perpetual, in order to divide, destabilize, demoralize, disorient, and control.
The left is one weapon among many, along with manufactured crises, economic manipulation, cultural fragmentation, and psychological warfare.
Evil today is not cloaked in mysticism. It is administrative, technocratic, bureaucratic, digital, and invisible. It wears suits, not horns. It speaks in press releases, not growls. It ruins nations gently, through policy, narrative, coordination, and pressure, so softly that people forget what life looked like before the rot set in.
This evil does not appear as tyrants on balconies with histrionic fidgeting. It appears as systems that just keep failing, always in the same direction, always harming the same people, always empowering the same few.
And for the first time in generations, this evil is not hiding. It is confident. It is proud. It believes its victory is inevitable.
But its confidence is also its weakness.
Only a force that believes itself unchallengeable becomes arrogant enough to show its face.
The Cuban regime is a textbook illustration of everything described above, an ideological project born not from the will of the Cuban people, but from back-room dealings, international maneuvering, and the silent approval of interests far larger than the island itself. History asks us to believe that more than six hundred attempts were made on Castro’s life, all of them conveniently unsuccessful. Meanwhile, one of the most prosperous nations in the Western Hemisphere collapsed almost overnight into a caricature of Third World dysfunction.
The economic narrative was rewritten, numbers manipulated, and the world was expected to swallow the fiction without question. It was a perfect emulation of Orwell’s Eurasia, Oceania, Eastasia, flipping ideological ménage-à-trois. A country that, in barely six decades, had built modern institutions, thriving industries, and one of Latin America’s highest standards of living was suddenly recast as the ultimate example of “the exploitation of man by man.” The collective consciousness was forcibly reset. A police state descended upon six million Cubans under the familiar pretext of constructing “the workers’ paradise.”
And what is left after nearly seventy suffocating years? A broken nation, kneeling, depleted, with outstretched hands, begging investment and relief from the very people it once denounced, insulted, threatened, and cast away. A country stripped of dignity and vitality, left to barter what little remains in exchange for survival.
TO BE CONTINUED…
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Miami Strategic Intelligence Institute (MSI²).