Transcript of #BecauseMiami: Because Purgatory

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Your whole family voted for Trump.

. Do you feel disappointed, deceived?. One of President Donald Trump's most loyal voting blocks, Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants. Now, speaking out in Miami, a Republican stronghold as the recent wave of deportations hits home. Elena Condé says she came here from Cuba on humanitarian parole in 2023. Her husband, Ariel Lara, crossed the border with Mexico twice. Six weeks ago, he was taken into custody at his residency hearing. Now, Elena is left behind with her daughter, seven-month-old son, and Ariel's 70-year-old grandmother. Together, facing a reality they never imagined.

If Cuba is Hell, Miami is Purgatory, so wrote dissident Cuban writer, Rinaldo Arenas. Upon arriving in Miami during the marrial boat lift of 1980. And now that seems to be clearer than ever. The Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. And so here we are. John Lee Anderson is a staff writer for The New Yorker. You can read it at newyorker. Com. His latest, Have Cubans Fled One Authoritarian State for Another, is now available, and it's a hell of a read. Let me just give you this passage. The new version of freedom flights has been upon us in recent years, ever since 2021, when anti-government rallies filled the streets. You might all remember Patria Yvida in Cuba and people protesting the oppressive policies, the lack of medicine and food. Castro had died five years before, but the Communist Party retained its grip on power, and it put down the protests harshly, jailing and beating hundreds of demonstrators. Since then, an estimated 18% of Cubans, as many as 2 million residents, have left. This represents the largest outflux in the 66-year span of the tumultuous revolution. By comparison, because it's amazing, John Lee is a very intuitive writer because I was thinking the same thing.

I'm like, 2 million. I'm like, When the Mariel boat lift happened, that was about 125,000 Cubans arrived in South Florida over the span of about 6-8 months or so. That was considered a cataclysmic humanitarian and economic crisis. It nearly bankrupted the four Southernmost counties of Florida, Monroe, Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. Now, 2 million have effectively fled the island, but that's how bad shit has gotten in Cuba. John Lee is 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.

Yeah. I mean, you were talking about the Marielbo lift, and then I lived there in Havana in '92 to '95, at the time of the Balceros crisis, the Rafters crisis, which happened in '94, and about 50 to 60,000 Cubans left. And at the time, it was two years into what they called the Special Period, which was right after the Soviet Union collapse, and all the aid that had kept the island afloat for 30 years, abruptly ended. And tractors became and cars went to bicycles, people got skinny. It was a bad time. This is, in some ways, much worse. I say in some ways, because in those days, Cubans couldn't to leave. Even I had to ask permission to leave the island. And the idea of Cubans traveling abroad or working abroad were eased up under Raul Castro 10 or so years ago. But in the year since then, although Cubans could, in theory, come and go, the economy and the expectations of a future have completely plummeted. And so in the wake of the opening between Raul Castro and Barack Obama in 2015 to '16, just before Fidel died, there was this amazing moment when it looked like the barriers between the two countries were coming down.

Americans could visit the island. Cubans could visit America. It was all hunky dory. And then it closed up again. And it closed up. It's a complicated set of reasons why it closed It was up, partly Trump, but also partly the Conservatives on the island. And then you had COVID, and then you had the uprising by people in 2021, you referenced, and the crushed expectations of an increased liberalization, some private enterprise initiatives that had gotten underway. There's been a waxing and waning as the party tries to take control. It's increasingly militarily run. So you've just had this exodus that's unbelievable. When I went back in May for the first time in a number of years, I was trying to put my finger on what was different, because in some ways, the story of Cuba the past 30 years since the end of the of a Union is one of decrepitude. It's one in which we've seen the place become famously distressed. There's 50s Chevies, nothing's painted. Some people think that's quaint, whatever. But this time, it was that plus no tourists and no people. There was less people everywhere. And I finally realized, wow, it's true.

The Exodus, there's literally less people. You notice that there are less people. Every Plaza I went to was empty of people. The old crowded parts of old Havana where people would get hustled by people selling cigars, girls, people wanting you to go in their restaurants. There were still a few hustlers there, but now there were indigent old men lying on the street. And when you got to the famous old colonial plaza, it was a guy with no legs, a couple of old women offering, how shall I put this, sexual favors, grandmotherly aged. It was miserable. It was miserable.

I live in the tropics. We live in the tropics here, and I cannot fathom the description of life in Cuba that you describe. No 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. It sounds like when I quoted Arenas earlier, Cuba really sounds now more than ever, perhaps like a hellscape.

Yeah. The thing is, for an older generation of Cubans that came of age with the revolution and for a while believed in it, They would put up with the penuries, with the scarcities, because Fidel was still alive. Fidel Castro was still alive. This amazingly charismatic leader telling them that the reason why they were putting up with scarcities was because of the blockade, as they called the American embargo. And there was an element of truth to that. During the Cold War, there was this us and them. There was a sense of purpose. But that's been diminishing for years now. For the United States, Cuba doesn't mean anything anymore. It's not a neuralgia logic hotspot. It could well be, again, if the cartels decide to use it as a trans-schipment point, it is the logical one. And in credit to him, even posthumously, it has to be said that Fidel Castro kept the cartels out, unlike all of the other countries in the region.

Well, he did, actually. For a time.

No, he did. But now you feel the ebbing of control. Even six, seven years ago, Cuba, alongside Canada, jostled for number one and number two as the most secure countries in the entire Western hemisphere. Cuba might have people who were on the make, but there wasn't a lot of violent crime, and there was not a street drug problem. Now there is. There is more need. Therefore, like everywhere, there's more violent crime. It's difficult to know how much there is because, of course, that isn't reported in the the same way it is elsewhere. But the illusion that Cuba was somehow exceptional, here I am beginning to feel a certain parallelism with the United States. The idea that Cuba for 60 years in the minds of the believers in the revolution was an exceptional place has ebbed almost completely. And therefore, the end of the Cuban Revolutionary dream is colliding against what I see as the end of the American dream.

Let's talk about that parallelization because you to, of course, deal with this irony that now more than ever, in 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 racist double standard in our policy of Cubans versus Haitians. That said, you describe very vividly the Cubans being wider, 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. You ask 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.

That's right. It's equally reported in both places. I made two trips to Miami in the course of the summer and spent time talking to people there, including Cubans who are hunting down fellow Cubans who have come into the United States as part of it.

The repressors, the repressor list.

The repressors. As part of that exodus, and whom they believe, or in some cases, it's true that these people, it's at one point or another work for the regime. And therefore, they don't feel that they should have the benefit of a life in the United States. And in a couple of cases, people have been arrested and deported, including a judge not long ago and a guy from the Ministry of Interior, that is to say their secret police and so on. So what's happening is that people who at various times worked for the regime And it has to be said, too, that over the course of decades, that would eventually include a lot of the Cuban people because it was, after all, a command economy and a socialist regime. Therefore, to go to college, you might have to join one of the revolutionary groups, or you might have to join the Communist Party. All of that, according to people like Marco Rubio and his friends who are behind this push to expel Cubans who participated with the regime, that's somehow a bridge too far, including Representative Jimenez there in Miami. That means that you made a choice at one point, and you've got to live with your choice.

Well, I'm not sure who gets to throw the first stone here. In the course of these past 60 years, I mean, my God, there were people that were revolutionaries who participated in putting Fidel Castro into power, who also fled years ago. Sure. What What makes someone who fled 40 years ago and someone who fled last year?

Listen, I don't want Miami to become the Argentina of Cuba. I don't want these former oppressors, 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 Diddian, in 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 the idea of the tribal warfare from back home in Cuba, spilling over into the streets of my... Banging out in Miami. Right. That seems disturbing to me, though. Who makes the list, right?

Well, Miami makes the list, right? Because if you were tied to Samosa or Batista or the Contras or anybody else, you were fine in Miami all these years. And by the way, so were a bunch of cocaine cowboys. So Miami is not exactly a place of moral rectitude. It's an American Casablanca where conspireurs or exiles, mostly on the right, can and come and do whatever they want and plot coups, assassinations, and rebellions from there. The Contra War, I remember going down to Miami in the 1980s and talking with Frank Sturgis, who was a former CIA asset and a Watergate burglar who was then involved with the CIA's program to overthrow the then Sandinista government. It's always been a place where Where one man's freedom fighters, another man's terrorists.

John Lee, 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. I would see every morning Eugenio Rolando Martínez 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 do pushups, and take this sabbat, 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.

Exactly. I mean, Félix Rodríguez is still living there. He's the guy who gave the order to the Bolivians to kill Che Guevara in Bolivia. He was a CIA operative for a long, long time. He also was involved in the Iran Contra scandal. He has has never been tried for his crimes, nor did Posada Carriles, who was actually a terrorist, and Orlando Bosch, both of whom, arguably, were responsible for scores of deaths of people.

And in America as well. I mean, Miami, people forget, became the terrorism capital of the United States of America from the 1960s, from the Revolution through really the late '90s, early '00s. That long, you had hundreds of bombings. You had Orlando with the shoulder launch, the missile across government caught the Polish freighter. You had hijackings of airplanes. You had most of this, of course, being what we, I guess, would call right-wing violence and terrorism.

Exactly. I mean, if you were a left wing Latin American in the Cold War years and a little bit after, you went to Mexico City or you went to Spain. If you were going to stay in the West, you didn't come to Miami. So it's interesting. It's interesting that Cuba is as bad as it is that people who were members of the repressive apparatus in Cuba's Communist government have decided they could slip in unnoticed and maybe live out their lives in the United States. The point is, I think we're in now a post-ideological era in which Trump is on the right, but nobody in their hearts believes that he has any real attachment to any political philosophy, right? Amunism clearly has failed in the hemisphere. The Cuban Revolutionary Dream is over. But at the same time, there's no loyalty to the past coming from this new set of leaders in the United States, and this idea that everybody's deportable if they're brown-skinned or, God forbid, black-skinned and come from one of these countries to our south. It's a real betrayal, I think, of even the most hackney principles in which we upheld America as a place of freedom, this lighthouse for freedom and refugees, that's over, too.

And so a lot of people go around talking about the American dream. Well, what is the American dream and to whom? Well, the American dream for generations of Latin Americans has been the city on the hill, a place of freedom where you could go and you You could make a living. You might even be able to put your kids through college, and you could say what you wanted. Not anymore. In a very perverse way, it's aping the authoritarian frameworks of the societies that many of them have fled.

Before we go, John Lee, I wanted to share this with you. I was making a documentary many years ago that never got released called American Spies. We interviewed Felix Rodriguez, we interviewed Eugenio Rolando Martinez. You're always looking for, as you know as a writer, for the last line, right? Who gets the last word, the last sound bite, or what perfectly encapsulates what it is that we're... What this whole enterprise is about? In our case, it would have been a feature documentary. So how do you condense two hours into one bite and from whom? And so I was sitting interviewing Eugenio Rolando Martínez at the Brigade 2506 Museum in Little Havana. We were in this room, and he's surrounded by these black and white portraits, these 8 by 10s of these young men, his brothers in arms who perished or were captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion. And he said something, and I'm like, Oh, shit, this is going to be the last line. I never got to make it, but I shared it when he died in February of 2021. And unbelievably, my grandmother, may she rest in peace, called me and said, Billy, you're in the New York Times.

And I said, Oh, no, what did I do? And she said, No, it's the Obets. I said, Well, I'm fine. Thank you for calling and checking on me. She goes, No, about this Watergate burglar. And sure enough, the last line in the New York Times Obit quoted my Facebook page and became what I wanted to be the last line of my documentary. But when we interviewed him, he passed away at 98 years old, by the way, he lamented his unsuccessful lifelong mission to free his homeland and the friends who sacrificed their lives at Playa Hirón. For what? They all died for nothing. We lost Cuba. Then suddenly, his eyes brightened up like he was just struck by a sweet warm breeze off the Coast of Barradero, and he grinned slyly, But we won Miami. I was like, well- That's a great line, and it's true. That's the line.

It's true.

John Lee Anderson, please read this story at newyorker. Com. It's absolutely fascinating and a great piece of what people might consider old school shoe leather journalism. I mean, these dispatches to just a very vivid and frightening Cuba and a very disturbing Miami as well. I appreciate you so much for being here.

Thanks, Billy. I enjoyed it.

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Dr. Marvin Dunn filed a lawsuit against the Miami Dade College Board of trustees, claiming the board violated the law by failing to provide sufficient notice for a special meeting on September 23rd, where they voted in favor of the donation to the state. A week later, Governor DeSantis and other Republican leaders took a vote to transfer the land again, this time to the foundation for Trump's Library. An agenda was released ahead of the meeting, but it only stated the board would consider conveying property to a state fund and provided no details on which piece of property was being considered or why. On Tuesday, circuit Judge, Mavel Ruiz, ruled in favor of the plaintiff.

You may remember a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Marvin Dunn was on the podcast, and he basically ended with, We'll see you in court. We'll see your ass in court. True to his word. He saw their collective ass in court and won the day, did not win the war, but won the battle, at least temporarily. So good for you.

Yeah, makes me smile for now.

Small victories. I'm certain that if it's not reversed on appeal, at the very least, there'll be a pretty simple remedy for it, which is that they'll have to properly notice the meeting so they're not in violation of Florida's public records laws or sunshine laws to conduct government and meetings in the sunshine. So once the public's properly They noticed there can be an event, a hearing, a protest, maybe public comment. Obviously, they wanted to slide this through very quickly and quietly without all of that. Now, they'll just have to do it again, basically, is what's going to happen. I think this is inevitable Also, I think there's probably some alternate locations in downtown Miami that does not require the giveaway of a $300 plus million dollar piece of property from the college.

Or me looking at the construction from work.

You will be looking at this construction from work one way or another. God damn it. There's no doubt about it, I'm telling you. But you might have a place to play Black Jack or the Slots.

Yeah, I can do that in Broward.

Yeah, but then you got to go all the way up to- Broward. Wouldn't you just want to- I lived there, though. Wouldn't you just want to go right across the street, though? You got to take the Bright Line. You got to murder all those hobos on the train.

No, no. That Fox news correspondent wants to do that, though. Kill Mead?

Yes. You should ride the Bright Line. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. Get on and get off on the Bright Line, Brian. Miami is the city of the future, and it will be, particularly for football. Isn't it, Roy? I hate watching people lose their job on television. That's why I didn't watch The Apprentice. I don't like seeing people... The economy is hard enough, shit's tough enough.

I just didn't want to see Trump.

That's why I didn't like it. I don't like to see people lose their livelihoods or lose their jobs. I just don't like that. I stopped watching Dolphins games because you're just watching people lose their jobs.

That Browns game was a travesty.

I don't know what you're talking about.

The Cleveland Browns, they play in Cleveland, Ohio.

I don't know what you're talking about. Why can't any team in Miami have a quarterback that can identify their receivers versus the other team's receiver?

Oh, by the way, is the U Back?

The U, as it turns out, is not quite back yet. Are they in the neighborhood? I really thought we were beyond the senseless midseason loss. I really thought that this team was beyond that. I really, really did. These Miami teams helped me fall out of love with sports as a child. I used to watch my dad and my grandpa hoody it up. They were such babies that even the dolphins made them cry. I'm like, I cannot, as a grown-ass man, as I become a grown-ass man, allow my emotions to be hijacked by the behavior of these millionaires who play for these billionaires or for a bunch of college kids. I can't be too emotionally invested because otherwise, I'm just going to go fucking insane.

You know the three biggest dividers this world has offer is religion, politics, and sports. And do sports, it just makes you cry, man. It's just an emotional... It's just...

Oh, my gosh. It's the male emotional outlet because Men are often raised to be a man, be an alpha, to suppress your emotions. Men don't cry. But sports allows you that. Socially, men are allowed to emote over sports. So That's always been that outlet. That said, I just couldn't see myself as emotionally invested in it as my brother is, and my dad is, and my grandpa is, especially when you know, Hey, you know What's that, Roy? What's that, Billy? Next year is going to be our year. The U is going to be back next year? Next year is going to be, and the dolphins, too. The dolphins. It's all going to be back. Next year is going to be... But no, but people believe this crazy shit. Fan is short for fanatic. There's no logic There's no sense. That's why there's an offseason so that you have time to convince yourself that something good or something different is going to happen.

Yeah, but with the Florida Panthers, they had two months. Two months offseason.

I did the math, by the way. If you believe the figures averaged out for NIL, then you consider about 13, 14 games. I think there was five interceptions in the Hurricanes game, even though one was called back for a bullshit call. But it was nice to see a call at least go our way. About $71,000 per interception, Carson Beck was paid in NIL money. That's a lot. At that game. I'll throw interceptions for a lot less, by the way. For a lot less. No, I'm no good at football, but neither are they, as it turns out. I mean, come on now. I say, Recruit Chad Power. Walk on. Run on. Chad Power, run on.

Get Glenn Power out there.

Holy shit, man. Fucking depressing. That is the first and last time that we're going to have a football conversation on Because Miami. I'm looking for... You know what I'm looking for? God damn it. It's the Glare off the keys, off the lights. At least there are some things to celebrate here in Florida. Every year, WalletHub analyzes 52 metrics across five categories of all 50 states: personal and residential safety, financial safety, road safety, workplace safety, and emergency preparedness, and we did not do well in most of those. In fact, here's a few really bad ones. We ranked 25th in job security. We ranked 36th in fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles of travel. We ranked 45th in loss amounts from climate disasters per capita. Oh, man. 39th in sex offenders per capita. Holy shit. And 47th in the share of uninsured population.

Oh, no. I mean, your insurance for your home is not exactly going to be great. Neither is the insurance for your car.

And by the way, we were ranked 46 last year. We have actually slipped from the 2024 to the 2025 rankings. Among the other least safe states, the worst was Louisiana, then Mississippi, then Texas, then Florida, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma, Colorado, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri. Those are the bottom 10 least safe states. I'm noticing some political trends there as well.

Well, everywhere except for Colorado.

But I will say that the top 10 safest US cities in 2025, according to this extensive Wallet Hub study, number one is Vermont. Number two, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Utah, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Wyoming. Wyoming? Once again, there is an odd- Wyoming? I guess the isolation. Not enough people? I guess. But they got two senators. That's how that works, Roy. Yeah. They get the same two that everybody else gets, but that's because they're such a safe state. Exactly. They're such a state. Number 10, safest state. Any other good news to share?

I'm racking my brain right now, and I got nothing.

Well, I just have one more thing to say.

What's that, Billy?

Cocains.

Now is a good time to remember where tequila's story truly began. In 1795, Cuervo invented tequila. Cuervo. What are you doing here? Cuervo.

Anytime someone says Cuervo, I show up.

Well, I do know that to be true, but even during an ad reads like... Cuervo. I think it could lay out, especially for one of our great partners.

Sweet, delicious Cuervo.

Since then, Cuervo has stayed true to its roots. The same family, the same land, the same passion. Cuervo. So enjoy the tequila that started it all. Cuervo. Cuervo. The tequila that invented tequila. Proximo. Cuervo. Com. Please drink responsibly. Cuervo.