Welcome to Stories of Communism, the podcast where we discuss what life is really like for those unfortunate enough to live under communist or socialist governments. Recording from the suburbs of Wichita, Kansas, this is Erik Seligman, your host, with co-host Manuel Castaneda dialing in from Oregon.
Today we’re going to be catching up with Nelson Rodriguez Chartrand, the Cuban dissident who we last spoke to a few years ago, back in episode 12. You may recall that he was a Cuban lawyer who had the audacity to start teaching free market economics to his friends and neighbors, about a decade ago, when it looked like government controls might be loosening a bit. As you can guess, that didn’t last, and after being arrested and beaten by the police, Nelson managed to flee to Brazil. As he adapts to his new capitalist life, he’s still trying to fight for freedom in his homeland, most recently by publishing a new book, “La Revolucion de Las Promesas”, or in English, “The Revolution of Promises”.
By the way, one slight difficulty we had interviewing is that Nelson isn’t fluent in English, and I’m not fluent in Spanish. But my co-host Manuel was able to act as translator. To make the audio flow more smoothly, I won’t play Manuel’s Spanish translation of my questions, but I will include Nelson’s Spanish answers as well as the English, so you can hear our interviewee’s real voice.
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Again, Nelson’s new book is titled “La Revolucion de Las Promesas”, and if you can read Spanish, you can order it on Amazon, using the link in the show notes at storiesofcommunism.com. Hopefully an English translation will be coming one of these days as well.
And this has been your Story of Communism for today.
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