by Erica Ritz
April 8, 2013
A
man who escaped communist Cuba gave an impassioned defense of the
rights of his adopted country Friday, saying “only [his] death” will
stop him from speaking out about freedom and the Second Amendment, which
he says are one in the same.
Testifying
in Salem, Oregon, on proposed gun control legislation, Manuel Martinez
grew visibly emotional when describing all he has seen.
After
describing how “malicious” individuals “masquerading as Democrats” came
into power into power in Cuba in 1957, Martinez described how they went
to work disarming the citizenry and established a bloody regime.
Pointing at the lawmakers arguing for stricter gun control, Martinez said:
“I’ve been through it. I’ve been there. You people don’t know what freedom is because you never lost it! You haven’t been tortured. You haven’t been [sic] assassinations. You haven’t been — mothers begging for the life of their son not to be killed because the only reason is they want is to be free. And they killed the mothers, and they killed the son.”
“If
we keep tangling with the Second Amendment, we are open the same way
that Cuba was open for Communism,” he said, noting that “China, Poland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Venezuela, on and on” have fallen into the same
trap.
“A
dictatorial regime will destroy this country, in the same way that it
destroyed those ones that I mentioned to you,” he asserted.
Martinez
went further: “Gun control do not protect anybody. Don’t protect the
citizens; don’t protect the people. The only reason for gun control is
for the government to be protected from the citizens,” he said. “In that
way the government can…manipulate the people and subjugate them.”
According to Dan Sandini at Daylight Disinfectant, who recorded the video, even those politically opposed to Martinez seemed “visibly shaken.”
Watch the entire speech to get the full effect, below:
