Billy Corben

Well, kind of.

He did, actually.

Let's talk about that parallelization because you, of course, deal with this irony that now more than ever, recent years, there hasn't been an exodus from the island.

People are desperate.

They're politically desperate.

They're economically desperate.

I've never quite known the difference between the two, even though American foreign policy has treated immigrants differently based on being economic refugees versus political refugees.

Again, I think that was more a product of a racial racist double standard in our policy of Cubans versus Haitians.

That said, you describe very vividly the early Cubans being whiter.

being wealthier compared to the way they are now and compared to what we see as a double standard as well amongst Cubans who have been in the United States and enjoyed our freedom and enjoyed our hospitality and our social welfare programs, if you will, and now are not and paid taxes and not necessarily welcoming to this new generation of Cubans who are just as, if not more desperate as they were

Generations ago, and you ask the question in your headline, have Cubans fled one authoritarian state for another?

Talk to me about what you witnessed, because you were not only dispatched to Cuba, to hell, but also to purgatory in Miami as well.

I don't listen.

I don't want Miami to become the Argentina of Cuba.

I don't want these former, you know, repressors, as it were, living comfortably here amongst us if they committed crimes against humanity back in Cuba.

That said.

Who gets to decide who those people are and who makes that list?

And how do you know if it's I recall a fellow New Yorker contributor, Joan Didion, and her maybe not her masterpiece, but to me, a masterpiece, Miami, which is still frighteningly, if not distressingly more relevant now than it was when she wrote it 40 years ago.

But like the idea of these kind of the tribal warfare from back home in Cuba sort of spilling over into the streets of my it just it bang out in

miami right and and it just that seems disturbing to me though who makes the list right