Billy Corben

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

John Lee, I used to.

Our office is on Miami Beach, and I would drive to the office.

I drive past the Miami Beach Convention Center, the Holocaust Memorial, beautiful sculpture.

And I would see every morning Eugenio Rolando Martinez taking his daily sabbatical.

Rolando was a Watergate burglar.

He lived well into his 90s and lived in Miami Beach and every morning would wake up, do pushups and take this very brisk walk as brisk as his body could take him around the block every day.

It's like it's only in Miami do you run into a Watergate burglar taking a stroll around the block every morning.

And in America as well.

I mean, Miami, people forget, became the terrorism capital of the United States of America from the 1960s, you know, from the revolution through really the late 90s, early zeros that long and hundreds of bombings.

You had Orlando Bosch with the shoulder launch, you know, the missile across government caught the Polish freighter.