"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." So begins Charles Dickens' historical novel "A Tale of Two Cities."

In Washington, D.C., and Havana, the final months of 2020 have undeniably been the worst of times: "Foolishness" (lack of wisdom), "incredulity" (no belief), "darkness" (absence of light); it is a Dickensian "winter of despair."

Deceivingly yet successfully, Donald Trump's presidential campaign made anti-communism one of its key political weapons. Trump presented himself as protector against a Cuban-style socialist/communist agenda hidden inside the Democratic Party's Trojan horse.

But the United States has perhaps the world's least fertile soil for the cultivation of socialism. For goodness's sake! Tens of millions of citizens, many of them poor and uninsured, even oppose the idea that all Americans should have access to medical care, whether they can afford it or not.

Besides, communism is dead, even in China and Cuba; and in Europe, democratic socialism has been in retreat for decades. A handful of countries may still be ruled by communist parties but have fully embraced perverse versions of capitalism — state capitalism in the case of Cuba. What remains stubbornly alive is the authoritarianism and repression characteristic of communist regimes.

To the surprise of most observers, in recent years, the world's oldest and most successful democratic republic has become fertile ground for authoritarian undemocratic rule, abuse of power and extreme political corruption. And to think that this country not too long ago sacrificed 405,399 lives to defeat Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy and Imperial Japan.

Leftists (real and phony ones), it is true, have been crying wolf (fascism) for a long time, but the sharp-fanged wolf has finally arrived. Some of the wolf's most blatantly authoritarian actions thus far are the dispatch of military units to the streets of Washington, D.C., in June and the following month's deployment of assorted armed and masked federal agents to Portland, where they beat and arrested peaceful protesters without cause and shoved them into unmarked vehicles headed for undisclosed detention centers.

Those are the kinds of things that happened in unabashedly repressive regimes — Chile's Pinochet; Batista's and the Castros' Cuba; and Mugabe's Zimbabwe — and continue to happen in North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia, whose strongmen President Trump holds in high regard.

This November, Cuba's political police and other repressive forces launched an offensive against the peaceful demonstrators of Havana's San Isidro artists movement, several of whom were arrested Portland style, albeit in clearly marked police vehicles. Havana's streets were militarized Washington style, by SWAT forces. Cuba observers recognize the unprecedented nature of those protests.

Even before his electoral defeat, Trump and his loyalists sabotaged and delegitimized the electoral process. Since then, they have continuously claimed that Democrats, in alliance with the Maduro regime, stole the elections. This week alone, Trump uttered with a straight face that he won by a landslide, met with his closest associates to discuss a military option to overturn the election results, and granted pardons for a catalogue of corrupt and lawless associates including three convicted former Republican congressmen, four mercenaries convicted of war crimes and a turncoat traitor.

We are beyond the unimaginable, and there is no telling how far Trump will go to retain power and sabotage President-elect Joe Biden's incoming administration. My list of never-in-America continues to shrink.

Those of us who know dictatorship first-hand recognize foreboding signs of growing authoritarianism. My family fled dictatorial Cuba as exiles in 1962 (I was 2 at the time); eight years later, we left Peru, where we had resettled, in the aftermath of a leftist military coup. I retain vivid images of Peru's president being dragged out of the presidential palace in his pajamas, his eyeglasses dangling precariously from one ear.

Decades of study of dictatorship in Latin America contribute to my apprehension. As a graduate student, I studied the collapse of other democracies: Brazil (1964), Argentina (1966), Chile and Uruguay (1973). The latter two had a long and robust democratic tradition. I also spent an entire decade researching Cuba's socialist revolution.

And just this week, I finished an article on Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo, a narcissistic, megalomaniac multimillionaire who demanded absolute loyalty and adulation, who treated opponents vengefully and loved all things military, especially parades and rallies; a racist who hated black immigrants from Haiti (one of Trump's "s—-hole countries").

Americans, wake up! Let's turn the future into "a spring of hope" flowing in "wisdom," "belief" and "light." Let's make America democratic again (MADA).

Readers can reach Luis Martinez-Fernandez at LMF_Column@yahoo.com. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: flunkey0 at Pixabay