Jon Lee Anderson

And that's kind of what's happened to a lot of Cubans.

So when I first went back, I hadn't been in a while.

I was struck by the emptiness of Cuba.

And I went to Havana and three other towns in the interior.

And everything was just empty.

There was no people.

I really felt the exodus.

And, you know, I visited old friends.

You know, the friends I have are mostly quite old people now.

Some have died, some have left, their kids have left.

Many of them are being sustained by the remittances their kids can send for wherever they're living, Spain, the United States.

And the houses around them are empty and also inhabited in some cases by also elderly people because their kids and grandkids have left as well.

Yeah, I mean, I lived there during that period, David, in the early 90s when the Soviet rug was pulled out from them and people went from

driving cars to riding bicycles.

And in the countryside, they went from tractors literally to oxen.

And the average Cuban lost, I don't know how much of their body weight.

And there was a lot of suicide.

And it was bad.

It was bad when I was there in the early 90s.

Then, as you said, Venezuela stepped in.