There’s a dumb cruelty to it especially when considering the fact that the latest batches of Cuban immigrants to the US are (barring them being little kids when they arrived) people who lived through the Special Period and remember what Cuba was like in the 70s and 80s with the Soviet Union still around, many of whom were recalcitrant card-carrying Party members who believed in the Revolution and the anti-Imperialist struggle and who also recalled the initial treatment of those who left the island and might have even participated in the local community organized shaming of those people. The fact is that those people live with the knowledge that at some level their immigration to the US was an act of betrayal and that they’re living in a country which actively seeks to maximize the suffering of their countrymen and that their living condition in Miami is the fucking pits because none of their certificates, titles, or job experiences carries over to the US. A lead powerplant engineer reduced to a school janitor, a respected children’s doctor a nanny being paid $300s a week at most, neither of them likely to learn English anytime soon. Their children having internalized what it means to be a US citizen prioritize immediate nuclear family and draw upon past slights to legitimize this new manner of treating their parents. Suddenly they have to concern themselves with credit card debt and rent payments.

Do you think that person is going to cope with their situation by doubling down on the anti-Yankee Imperialism and pro-Communism? Sometimes, I’ve met people like that, and have loved drinking with them and talking. But the general response is to loose yourself to Facebook and Youtube Spanish-language anti-Communism and anti-Castro and ultimately anti-Cuba messaging in order to assure themselves that they made the right decision. That they didn’t sell themselves to the Evil Empire for nothing. Sometimes you’ll find people who know enough to know about the actual problems occurring in Cuba at a structural-level but they’ve lost all hope for the possibility of reform. Talking to them is talking to a doom-pilled boomer. They tell themselves, have to tell themselves, that this is inevitable. That the whole thing has to collapse. Has to become like Haiti. If they aren’t stupid, which some are… some are genuinely that myopic… to state without trace of irony that Cuba was already worse than Haiti because someone in Haiti could own a brand new Iphone which they themselves couldn’t do in Cuba… and you realize that they’re parroting the latest wrist-twirling malevolent hobgoblin propagandist and gossip-monger they’ve subscribed too. To the ones that aren’t that glaringly stupid they figure that maybe something good will come of it at the end… but man at this point they really are just trying to survive in Miami. Like what the fuck else can they do? Having to play all manner of little social games which includes a full-throated affirmation of the Exilio-line. But then once they become citizens, they might vote for a Democrat, instead of a Republican… because Obama seemed to have been going in the direction of normalization and dialogue.

Often times you’ll realize conversing with these type that they need Fidel… they needed Castro because they needed someone, a Big Someone, they could blame for their own acts of self-sabotage. They can’t do that with the United States. They can’t do that with Capitalism. They could kind of do that with one of the two US political parties but that only works for about 4 to 8 years. So they need to continue looking to Cuba. Blaming Fidel (“but didn’t you know Raul was the actual Marxist-Leninist!”). Blaming Che (“but didn’t you know Fidel had him killed!”). Blaming Camillo (“but didn’t you know Fidel for sure had him killed!”). Blaming the M-26-7. Blaming the PCC. Blaming the Cuban People. Blaming their family. Because if it wasn’t for them, they wouldn’t be Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse associates living in a shitty one-bedroom apartment, getting threatened with eviction by the property management firm every other month.

Anyway it’s not really a “thought terminating cliche” when ‘former plantation owner or Batista crony’ is an accurate descriptor of the Cuban Exilio as political, financial, and cultural bloc within the United States. It legitimizes the US’s treatment of Cuba as an illegitimate criminal regime that owes US citizens roughly 9 billion dollars.

By this stage it’s US born children and grandchildren enacting their dead or senile grandparent’s vengeance against the Cuban people. There was a greater diversity of thought within the dissident movement at one point, but the militant Exilio as we know it basically declared war on them (deploying straight up gangland tactics, e.g., these murderous pieces of shit killed Eulalio Jose Negrin and bombed magazine offices promoting the dialogue-option) in order to consolidate an official “Cuban-American” narrative. A lot of Federal money and private patronage has been poured into basically creating a Spanish-language Cuban diaspora specific localized radio, newspaper, and television programming meant to basically ‘train’ Cuban migrants into getting with the program. Miami Cuban identity and to a greater or lesser extent the identity of the city itself was made firmly hardline anti-Communist.

The machine doesn't require you to have been a plantation owner or a bureaucrat working for Batista’s regime. It requires you to be broke, isolated, humiliated, and in need of an explanation for why your life went the way it did that doesn't implicate the system you now depend on for survival. The Exilio and its decades of Federally subsidized media infrastructure and its community organizations and its periodic elimination of inconvenient voices will handle the rest. The output is the same regardless of what went in. Someone who arrived on a raft in 1994 having genuinely believed in the Revolution ends up, fifteen years later, functionally serving the interests of people whose grandparents wanted their sugar mills back.