They are reactionary and bourgeois. These people were screwed big time by the Communists in Cuba. And like all emigre exiles (think the Czarists in Paris, the Irish in Boston, the Jews in New York, and the Vietnamese in California) They have festered forever the fantasy of The Return.

In Cuba, they had their property seized and they were driven out of the country without much more than the clothes on their backs. I know this for a fact, some were my relatives.

But they did get to enter the USA without any visas or paperwork, and they were given government aid and work permits when they got here, (unlike the Mexicans) because they embarrassed Castro. It was the Cold War, all you had to say to get a handout in those days was that you were anti-Communist.

They were then conned by the Kennedy administration into attacking the Bay of Pigs and when they got there they were betrayed by JFK and massacred, with no air support or the military aid they had been promised.

This exile experience colors their thinking, it trumps (no pun intended) the normal liberal political instincts of all Cubans and keeps them forever stuck in a Cold War mentality, easily exploited by right wing demagogues. Cuba always had universal health care and free college for anyone who could pass the entrance exams. Even before Castro. All civilized countries do. Biden and Bernie didn't invent it.

They've loved the Republicans and hated the Democrats ever since. And given their experience here, I can't say I blame them. But the GOP has used that to get their votes ever since. Cuban exile politics is driven by hatred of Fidel Castro, and little else. ANYBODY who says they are anti-Castro gets their loyalty. Anybody who doesn't is called 'un comunista'.

I was a Tampa Cuban, my family emigrated to Tampa about a century ago, but we still had family ties with the old country, and like most Cubans, we (at first) welcomed Fidel.

These words were written in my autobiography, about 20 years
ago.

It must have been soon after my last summer vacation in Cuba because I remember the great public demonstration of joy in the Tampa Cuban community when the tyrant Batista was routed and the rebels triumphantly rode on captured tanks into Havana. Later, as the Revolution progressed, most of the Tampa Cubans continued their support for Fidel. I remember the outrage expressed by my family at the CBS documentary 'Is Cuba Going Red?'. It was understandable, my mother was a New Deal Democrat, she remembered the Depression, had been a working woman all her life, we all knew how the USA had bullied Cuba from the war with Spain to the days of the butcher Batista. Although she worked very hard and lived very frugally for the support of her family, the welfare state, through my father's Social Security and Veteran's benefits, had made the difference. Memories were still fresh of the great strike that had crushed the Tampa cigar workers in the thirties, American systemic racism and the Commie-baiting that had been used against them and the obscenity of McCarthyism. I haven't forgotten either, I'm still a New Deal Democrat.

But as time passed it soon became clear that something was going terribly wrong with the Revolution, not only was the evidence in the press accumulating, we started getting veiled references in the censored mail coming out of the island. We could read between the lines, our family was suffering, and the oppression wasn't just economic due to the Yankee embargo. A grim apparatus of totalitarian rule was being unleashed on the people of Cuba, block Party committees that brought government surveillance down to the apartment building floor level, 'voluntary' labor in the sugar cane fields, forced conscription of the young and participation in the militia for everyone else. Then came the loss of employment for those who refused to cooperate, the ostracism of even the families of suspected critics of the regime, then beatings, imprisonment, and eventually, el paredón (firing squad). Family businesses were not expropriated outright by the government, but were forced to operate at a loss under restrictive regulation until the owners begged the State to take them over. This was then refused until the proprietors went bankrupt. Requesting an exit visa began an expensive year-long nightmare of red tape beginning with the immediate loss of one's job, home, property, legal rights, and the expulsion of children from school. At any time the process could be terminated by the whim of an official and it had to be started again from the beginning while the friends or relatives who sheltered you were subjected to constant harassment. You could take no cash away from the island, and only what property you could carry or wear on your back. At the airport, your baggage was ransacked of everything of value; jewelry and even clothing were often confiscated. I decided then and there that the simplest way to identify a dictatorship was if a state restricted the right of its citizens to travel abroad freely. Cuba was a government of corrupt officials, informers and bullies. My grandfather traced the whole sad business with the French Revolution of his youthful reading as a guide, the Terror had begun. In spite of all their troubles, the Cubans were always a happy people, both on the island and in exile, but they are no more. That is the Revolution's most remarkable achievement and its greatest crime.