January 2025

It was then, four years after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion meant to topple the Communist Castro regime in Cuba, that Lyndon Johnson dispatched Marines to the Dominican Republic, another island nation some 600 miles east of Cuba. Architecture was not the only similarity between the countries. The DR, like Cuba, had long been run by a local dictator, Rafael Trujillo. After his 1961 assassination and a military coup that deposed the country’s first elected president, civil war broke out; one side was led by pro-Castro forces, who had commandeered the major radio station. Faced with the prospect of another Cuba in the Caribbean, Lyndon Johnson dispatched the Marines. As with Vietnam, the left objected, as per folk singer Phil Ochs’ protest song, “The Shores of Santo Domingo,” where he sang “up and down the coast, the generals drink a toast.”

In reality, the Marines, who left the next year, ushered in an era of democracy and prosperity; there have been free elections since 1966. During the same period there’s been a striking economic divergence between the DR and Cuba. The World Bank writes most recently,

The economic growth of the Dominican Republic has tripled the regional average over the past two decades, resulting in 2.8 million people rising out of poverty, a middle class that now surpasses the poor population, and an improvement in access to basic services, housing and education.

Cuba, with a nearly identical 11 million population, saw its GDP fall by 1.9 percent in 2023. It has had trouble keeping its electric grid functioning. And, of course, it is a Communist dictatorship—ranked 178th in economic freedom by the Heritage Foundation.

One of the most disturbing trends in American society is the drift toward economic totalitarianism. More and more Americans are speaking fondly of excessive government control over economic life, an erosion of economic liberty which will have dramatic consequences for our other freedoms.[…]

The assault on freedom begins with economics because economics touches everything in life and economics is the primary means by which strong families emerge and with strong families the political, social, and religious freedoms we enjoy. Without family vitality, there is no societal vitality. This, too, was something that Friedman keenly understood.

Friedman stated unequivocally that our political and spiritual loves and liberties were very much contingent upon economic freedom, “The economic controls that have proliferated in the United States in recent decades have not only restricted our freedom to use economic resources, they have also affected our freedom of speech, of press, and of religion.” Today, we all sense this reality that Friedman saw over 50 years. As our economic freedoms deteriorate so too are their efforts to restrict our political and religious liberties.

The majority of the intellectual class has convinced itself of human perfection in some form or another. This is the basis of all totalitarianism—the incessant, even violent, effort to remake human nature into a perfect end-state. Yet Friedman stated that lovers and champions of freedom have always recognized this paradox about humanity and freedom: the imperfection of humanity is the greatest pillar for the freedom of humanity. As he writes, lovers of freedom “conceive of men as imperfect beings.”

Freedom is good, though we know it is imperfect because we ourselves are “imperfect beings.” Good things are always ruined by the fanatical dreams of perfection. The bait and switch of the tyrannical lust of totalitarians is that they blame our imperfection on a system rather than seeing imperfection in ourselves. This gives them the license to dismantle the goods we have from freedom through the phantasmagoric promise of a perfect future.