Billy Corben

John Lee's one of the most striking things about the story is your dispatch to Cuba and how you describe what's going on there.

Can you tell us about the plight of the Cuban people today?

Because it sounds horrific, if not worse than ever.

It was miserable.

I live in the tropics.

We live in the tropics here, you know, and I cannot fathom

The description of life in Cuba that you describe, no fuel, no fans, no air, no electricity, no food.

People can't sleep at night because it's too hot.

So you're saying the quality of life, the poverty, which has led to an increase in crime, which you also describe in your story.

I mean, it sounds like when I quoted Arenas earlier, Cuba really sounds now more than ever, perhaps like a hellscape.

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