Vivid memories and tales of woe have left scars on two descendants of socialism, who are now issuing public warnings over the future of New York City under the rule of Democratic-socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
“When I hear some of the plans that [Mamdani] has for New York City, again, it’s that, ‘copy, paste,’” Cuban-born Miami resident Karen Rodriguez told Fox News Digital. “It’s just very triggering because it doesn’t work… You have Cubans, they make it here to the United States, and they go into a grocery store and they cry… When was the last time you cried in a grocery store? Never, right? Because it’s so normal, and we take it for granted.”
“My ears perk up any time I hear people embracing socialism, especially very privileged people like this aspiring mayoral candidate from New York City, talk about how he wants to seize the means of productions, as he talked about in the past, he doesn’t like private property,” first-generation Lithuanian-American Gabriella Hoffman also told Digital.
Hoffman and Rodriguez, stressing the election of Mamdani, expressed major concerns for New Yorkers, highlighting their own families’ struggles with “wretched ideologies firsthand.”
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While Mamdani’s campaign platform has not formally called for full-scale nationalization of industries – a system described as government controlling the means of production and the take-over of private business – his proposals include free buses, rent control and city-owned grocery stores.
Rodriguez, a former journalist and current public school teacher, said her family’s connection to communism began before she was born. Her mother’s father and sister fled Cuba for Miami under Fidel Castro’s regime during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, which she notes as the second-largest mass immigration from Cuba.
Her mother was a 15-year-old professional gymnast in Havana when her father and sister left, choosing to stay in Cuba. Years later, her mother’s father began the “reclamo” process to bring his daughter to the U.S., but due to long immigration waiting lists, it wasn’t until 1994 that she and Rodriguez emigrated.
Rodriguez came to the U.S. at age six, shortly before turning seven, an important age milestone in her home country.
“When you are seven years old in Cuba, the government decides that you no longer need milk. So, at seven years old, they no longer give children the right to buy milk. And I was, like, a milk lover. And I would drink my milk morning and night to go to sleep,” Rodriguez explained. “So milk was super important for me because sometimes there was not a lot of other things. And for them to take that away was going to be difficult for my parents to figure out what else to feed me.”
Hoffman now leads the D.C.-based Independent Women Forum’s Center for Energy and Conservation, and is the first American-born in her family after they fled the former Soviet Union almost 40 years ago. Her parents entered the U.S. through New York City, ultimately settling in California.
Her mother and father are Lithuanian Jews who endured life under Soviet occupation in one of 15 republics of the U.S.S.R. Her maternal grandfather also survived 18 months in one of Stalin’s gulags, a brutal Soviet labor camp.
“I recall the horrors and sacrifices that my family members made, several generations, my grandparents, my parents. My parents making the arduous journey… it wasn’t an easy trip to make,” Hoffman said. “They lost some friends in the process. Some of their family members shunned them. And it was a big sacrifice to come to the United States starting anew. My parents came here virtually penniless.”
“They live the American dream, they’ve benefited from having the rights and privileges that are afforded to you as an American. And if the likes of Zohran Mamdani were to be advanced and platformed and mainstreamed, a lot of people who are fleeing actual persecution through this kind of pernicious ideology, they won’t have anywhere to go,” Hoffman added.
Both Rodriguez’s and Hoffman’s respective histories share many parallels, like limited food supply, government overwatch, electricity blackouts and brownouts and high taxation enforcing poverty.
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“We had what we call [the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution], which is like a community snitch basically. So, on every block, you have a person who is designated to keep tabs on their neighbors… And when [my family] decided to come on the boatlift, I guess that rumor started spreading that she and my grandfather were going to leave,” Rodriguez detailed.
“They thought of it as, ‘You’re a traitor, and if you’re not with me, you’re against me, so you’re opposing the regime.’ So these acts often included yelling, insults, throwing objects, vandalism, physical intimidation. And in my aunt’s case, her neighbors literally dragged her by the hair through her whole block, knowing that she was a type one diabetic since she was 11 years old,” Rodriguez said.
“You had to bribe people. You had to negotiate under the table for certain goods. My dad recalls having a stint working in medicine, in pharmacy, and he would be kind of this mediator between people who needed medicine. He would have to operate under the table to get people medicine,” Hoffman recalled.
Hoffman further described how the former Soviet Union controlled nearly all economic output, leaving individuals with little to no disposable income or choice.
“In the former Soviet Union, it was 90% that the government taxed you,” she claimed. “It was empty shelves, a perfect metaphor for what Democratic socialism is… So taking my family’s experience, applying it to politics… as government becomes more involved and interferes more in our personal lives, especially with respect to taxation and all these other big spending measures, that’s where you’re losing the freedoms.”
Both Rodriguez and Hoffman encourage New York City voters to think critically, educate themselves on candidate platforms and speak to their neighbors.
Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment or reaction to Rodriguez and Hoffman’s testimonies.
“Listen to these stories, listen to the people that have experienced it,” Rodriguez urged. “Listen to the people who have lived it, who have gone through it, read, compare, look at your life and look at it from a perspective of being grateful and realizing what a privilege it really is to live in America.”
“When I got here from Cuba, my aunt asked me, ‘What’s the first thing that you wanna eat?” she recalled. “And I said I had never seen a strawberry in my life… only on TV and cartoons…. Is that something you want your children to experience?… That is a reality of people who live in communist countries.”
“If the likes of Mamdani are to be elected to the mainstream platform, we could see New York not only becoming ‘Moscow on the Hudson,’ ‘Caracas on the Hudson,’ maybe even something worse,” Hoffman said. “And I know some of the younger people are like, ‘Oh, that’s a tired trope. We hear about this, maybe we should experiment with this,’ but every time it’s been attempted, replicated, it always has equitable misery as a result.”
“I just think the tone that he would adopt, and his posture, would just make New York City unattractive for investments. It would make it inhospitable. A lot of people will be leaving. He promises affordability. What his platform would deliver, ultimately, is unaffordability, high prices, energy scarcity and the like… If New York City falls in this direction, what other city will be next?”
“If he was to win, I would feel so bad for New York City,” Rodriguez concluded, adding that in her experience, “Communism is the only model of government that you can vote for, but you can’t vote yourselves out,” she warned. “Once you’re too far in, once you are fully emerged in the communist experience, and you decide that that is not for you, that’s when it’s too late.”
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