Foreign born Americans who have escaped from socialist hellholes have a tale to tell. Like my own Cuban father, they thought a socialist takeover could never happen in their country. They were wrong. Now, some see ominous parallels between the Democrats and their Antifa and Black Lives Matter allies and the Marxist terrorist forces that turned their former homelands into prisons.

“The millionaires, and anyone that was rich, were ‘the enemy of people’ in Venezuela,” said Elizabeth Rogliani, who left Venezuela for America in 2008.  She lives in Florida and is a conservative. “Division between the classes was something that Hugo Chavez wanted — to make sure that poorer sectors of society hated anyone that was wealthy.” Sound familiar to the words and stated goals of Antifa and the Democrats?

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Chavez defined capitalism as the “kingdom of the egoism of inequality” and socialism as the “kingdom of love, equality, solidarity, peace and true democracy.” Could have been taken from a Bernie Sanders campaign speech.

“Seeing these riots knocking those statues … it’s so similar “Chavez’s regime renamed “Columbus Day” to “Indigenous Resistance Day” in 2002. “In 2004, the Columbus statue came down in Venezuela. It was torn down by mobs. People had been encouraged by Chavez’s rhetoric,” Rogliani said. That is a scene that has been seen in many American cities. Can’t happen here? Guess again.

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“What we see now has all the same characteristics as I saw there … violence, looting, damaging private property,” Roberto Bendana, a Nicaraguan immigrant who is now a Texan, said of the recent unrest in the U.S. “Even the flags! The protesters here in the U.S. are using the red and black flags,” Bendana said. The Nicaraguan Sandinista socialist revolutionaries used the same colors. This is not a coincidence.

And then, who can forget the poignant brilliance of Maximo Alvarez at the Republican National Convention, “I heard the promises of Fidel Castro and I can never forget all those who grew up around me … who suffered and starved and died because they believed those empty promises. You can still hear the sounds of those broken promises. It is the sound of waves in the ocean carrying families clinging to pieces of wood. It is the sound of tears hitting the paper of an application to become an American citizen.”

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These are words to remember at the polling place in November, lest the United States go down the same tragic path.