The U.S., Cuba, and the people caught between

What's good, listener? So we prepared a different episode for today. But before we get into that episode, we just wanted to take a moment to make sure we marked the death and life of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who died at the age of 84. Yeah, Reverend Jackson was a towering figure. He was so influential to the country, to the work we do here at Code Switch. And we both have deep memories of how Reverend Jackson's presence popped up throughout the course of our entire lives, from the campaign trail to Sesame Street. I am somebody. I may be poor, but I am somebody. So we will talk more about his life and his legacy on the show later this month. But for now, we just wanted to say a quick rest in power and may his memory be a blessing. What's good, y'all? You are listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. So I was reading this story in the news not that long ago about how the Trump administration, which, of course, has taken a really hard line against immigrants, well, most immigrants, has been deporting Cuban immigrants in record numbers. This sudden surge surprised me, and I'm sure it comes as a bit of a shock to a lot of people, because Cubans had long been given these very special, distinct considerations when they came to the United States, things that made it much easier for them to get green cards or to become citizens here. Some of them even got money. But a lot of these special considerations have gone away in recent years. And now, Cubans coming to the U.S. are being treated kind of like immigrants from almost anywhere else. And let's talk about the scale of these recent arrivals from Cuba. More than 800,000 people have come to the U.S. since COVID tanked the economy there. And of course, giant caveat, the U.S. embargo of Cuba doesn't help the economy either. But the scale of these arrivals and the scale of these deportations have surfaced some uncomfortable divides among Cuban Americans and Cuban immigrants. And these are tensions over ideology and generation and, yes, race and class that are made even more tricky by the fact that Cuban American citizens who voted overwhelmingly voted for President Trump. It is all real messy. And so I called up a historian named Ada Ferrer to help illustrate some of these dynamics, because this is a huge story that has been unfolding in a lot of ways in her own family for more than half a century. And I was born in Cuba and came to the U.S. as an infant when I was about a year old. What she knew about that harrowing trip way back in 1963, she learned secondhand from her mom. She really told it as a story of she and I against the world, you know. It was her first time on a plane, first time leaving the country. I was 10 months old. She was traveling alone. She always stressed how good I was. She needed me to be good, so I was. So, you know, didn't cry, just, you know, sat at her hip. There were no direct flights from Cuba to the United States. And so baby Ada and her mom took this long roundabout route, first through Mexico City, and they were stuck there for some time. And then eventually she and her mom reunited with her dad in New Jersey with so many other people, it turns out, who were also fleeing the aftermath of Fidel Castro's revolution. You know, I grew up in a Cuban-American community where most of my neighbors were Cuban. All the stores were Cuban-owned. We went to church and prayed for the release of political prisoners and things like that. So Cuba was just everywhere. In that environment, Ada thrived. She was a great student. She went to really good colleges. Today, she's a Pulitzer Prize winning historian at Princeton. But back in Cuba... I had a brother on my mother's side who was supposed to come with us, but through very complicated circumstances was not able to join us. Things looked very different for her half-brother, Poli. I mean, his father did not want him to leave Cuba, and he was six when their mother left without saying goodbye. Poli would leave Cuba two decades later as part of this huge, sudden scramble to the U.S. from the island called the Mario Boatlift in 1980. By the time he leaves, he's 26. He doesn't speak English. He didn't have much schooling. There's already major, major differences between us. You know, with him at 26 and me at 18, he arrived the summer before I went to college. So in some ways you couldn't imagine more different paths and more different fates. Otter learned that Polly had felt abandoned by their mom. He had a really short temper. Otter wrote that he had these violent outbursts where he would hit her and her mother. and her mother would downplay these incidents or try to distract from them because she didn't want her husband, Ada's dad, to kick Poli out. Poli had been locked up in Cuba, and he had frequent real serious run-ins with the law here in the United States, including an arrest for attempted murder. Poli died in 2020, and Ada has written that his premature death seemed to confirm what he'd been feeling for years, that he'd been left all alone. So Ada has a book coming out this spring about all this. It's called Keeper of My Kin, Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. And it's the story of our family, yeah, but as you can hear, that story, it runs parallel to this larger geopolitical drama of these stop and start waves of Cubans landing in the United States over the last 60 years. and the very different and less open American public that greeted them, depending on when they got here. Ada says she thinks a lot about how her life and her brother's life would have been different if their places had been swapped. Eventually, Ada herself was able to return to Cuba. And when she became a historian, she naturally turned her attention back there. I started going to Cuba in 1990 to do research for a Ph.D. dissertation. And sometimes I would go to an event, I would go to a play or some kind of cultural event like that. And I would look around the audience and see people my own age and think that's who I might have been if we had stayed. Which is a kind of weird, weird feeling to have. But I also think that that's not quite right because in many ways that the waves of migration continued long after we came. So more recently, like for the last 10 years, or maybe even more, I've been thinking, what might have happened if I had stayed is that I might have left later. Right? Because it didn't end then. So it could be that I would have left later, that I would be one of the people, you know, a few years ago crossing the border illegally, you know, and having to deal with everything that's going on now. So I don't know. And then with him, I often thought, you know, what if he had come? He would have had access to school. He would have had his mother with him. He would have learned English. He could have been a different person. So on this episode, we're getting into some of that larger history that has shaped the lives of the very different Cubans who have come to the U.S. in very different ways. Around the time that Ada and her mom and her dad settled in New Jersey in the 1960s, folks in Washington were trying to figure out just what to do with all these Cuban exiles coming to the United States, right? These were exiles who were fleeing Cuba in the wake of the Communist Revolution and Fidel Castro's takeover of the government there. And what the U.S. officials came up with changed everything. The Johnson administration signed something called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which is an incredibly simple law with very far-reaching consequences. That voice you're hearing belongs to Michael Bustamante. He's a historian at the University of Miami, and he says all the texts of this law, the Cuban Adjustment Act, fit on just one page. But it basically said that anyone coming to the U.S. from Cuba could automatically be put on this conveyor belt to get permanent legal status here After at first two years and then it got reduced to one year in the 1970s any Cuban who subsequently was arriving and legally admitted or inspected into the United States, they could file paperwork for permanent residency and within, you know, a few weeks, months, have a green card. There's nothing like it on the immigration law books to this day. For the U.S., this law, this unique pathway available to Cubans was just good PR, right? This is the Cold War. And the U.S., which had imposed very strict sanctions on Cuba, got to show the world how well it was treating the people fleeing its communist neighbor. And I would just add also, this is a migration that is, in the beginning, largely upper and middle class, also largely white, at least as Cubans would have defined themselves racially in the kind of racial politics of Cuba. And so to the extent that there's always sort of a baseline nativism in US politics that goes way back, this is a kind of a story of openness to immigrant others, right? But in a kind of a conditioned way. And you see that when you look at the press coverage, when you look at these spreads in Time magazine and Newsweek magazine in the early 1960s, kind of celebrating the sacrifices and achievements of Cubans fleeing Castro, all of which is very compelling and very real, right? These stories are real and they can be inspiring. But when you start to also think about, I think the classic foil is Haiti at this time, which is under the Duvalier government. The Duvalier government is a right-wing authoritarian regime, also has people fleeing it, especially by the 1970s, and they are not given the same kinds of access to the United States and the immigration system as Cubans were. And so there's a racial politics there, there's an ideological politics there that is inextricable from these two stories. This law, the Cuban Adjustment Act was looming in the background as many people in Cuba were growing less enchanted with life on the island in the two decades after Castro's revolution. And they felt that if they could just get to the United States, and a lot of folks already had friends and family who had settled here, they could avail themselves of this law, this pathway to residency here. There was one gigantic problem, though. Fidel Castro, he was not letting anybody leave. And so then one day in 1980, a very disgruntled bus driver in Havana named Hector Sanjustiz was fed up. He just finally had enough. In April of 1980, a guy who's a bus driver who's desperate to get out of the country and not seeing an avenue to do so, plots with a friend of his to drive his bus at the end of his route after he had dropped off his last passengers and basically rammed the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana. Once Hector and a few other people on the bus with him busted through those gates, they were legally in another country. And so they asked the people at the Peruvian embassy to give them asylum, and the Peruvians did not turn them back over to Cuba. Cuban authorities say, OK, we're removing the guards from the Cuban state police or what have you from the embassy grounds. And then word spreads in Havana that the Peruvian embassy is unguarded. And within 48 hours, there are 10,000 Cubans that are in the grounds of the Peruvian embassy. And now all these people are asking for asylum, too. The house was a nice house, but not big enough for 10,000 people. I mean, there's people sitting on the roofs, people sitting on every – so it becomes this major international incident. And one of the outcomes is that eventually the Cuban government says, well, if folks in Miami want to come to Cuba to pick up their relatives who are either here at the Peruvian embassy or otherwise just want to leave, you can come to this port called Mariel Harbor, which is west of Havana, a big deep water port, and come pick up your relatives. And then Cuban-Americans in Miami start, you know, hightailing it for Key West and paying insane amount of money to white shrimp boat captains and stuff and saying, like, I'll pay you whatever to take me to Muriel Harbor in violation of U.S. law and go pick up my relatives. This is how the Mario Boatlift began, with a bus driver literally crashing out at the end of his shift. More than 100,000 Cubans would flee the country in this improvised exodus to the United States over the next couple months. Ada Ferrer's brother, Poli, who we heard about earlier, was one of those people. But Michael said these arrivals from the Mario boatlift were coming to the United States at a time when the American public was feeling a whole lot less welcoming than it had been in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. You know, the mood around migration had changed a lot by 1980. This is on the heels of sort of the boat people crisis from Southeast Asia in the wake of the U.S. pullout from Vietnam. The rising sort of anti-immigrant movement as we know it today is a thing. And so Carter has to backpedal. And essentially, about half of the Marial migrants were sent to detention camps on U.S. military bases. A bunch of them are let out, especially if they had family that could sponsor them. But some are never even admitted to the United States because they're deemed to be inadmissible because of suspected criminal backgrounds in Cuba. So that's like the first moment where you see kind of an exception made to the general open door policy. And another big thing that was different about the people who fled Cuba in the 1980 boatlift was that this exodus was a much more diverse one, a much blacker cohort with fewer professionals and more poor folks than the exodus in the 1960s. The boatlift became a huge political crisis for the president of the United States at the time, Jimmy Carter, and became a headache for some local politicians, too. Like, some of the Marialitos ended up in Fort Chaffee, this detention camp in Arkansas, and that state had a young, ambitious governor named Bill Clinton, who was up for re-election when everything there went sideways. There was a riot on the military base when the Cubans, who didn't have, had no idea like what their status was going to be, and they were sort of in this limbo and they got fed up and they sort of stormed the gates and then wandered into town. And then they were met by, you know, brigades of local citizens and local members of the KKK, not making this up. And there's a kind of a standoff. And so this whole incident and the controversy around Arkansas being a storehouse for these unwanted marial migrants, who, by the way, are also much more working class in origin, much more resemble the racial and demographic and ethnic makeup of Cuba as a whole, has everything to do with Clinton losing re-election. So, yeah, Bill Clinton narrowly lost his 1980 bid to be re-elected governor of Arkansas to a Republican named Frank White, not the drug dealer. And Clinton would not forget what happened and how much the Cuban migrant issue cost him politically. And so fast forward to the 1990s, the Soviet Union has collapsed and communist governments all over the world are being dismantled. The Cuban economy, which relied on the largesse of the Soviet Union, is in freefall. And of course, again, U.S. sanctions are making all of this worse. And so once again, another wave of Cubans on makeshift rafts and boats start trying to flee to the United States. And even though Castro had typically made it illegal to leave Cuba, this time he let them go. And so this is part of a kind of a gambit on the part of the Cuban government to sort of say, well, you know, if you're going to squeeze us at the neck, we're going to squeeze you in a different direction. We're going to sort of unleash mass migration and then maybe you'll come to the table. And in effect, that's kind of what happens. But now in the 1990s, Bill Clinton is the president of the United States. When he suddenly is confronted with this other Cuban mass migration in 1994, and he's now president, he says to himself, well, you know, I'll be damned if this is going to be the political ruin of me again. And so he says, I'm not going to do what Jimmy Carter did. I'm not going to allow these people to come. But the U.S. and Cuban governments signed a series of migration accords to try to regularize the flow of migrants going forward. So the basic deal was that going forward, any Cubans arriving that touched U.S. shore on a boat or via the border, come on in. But if the United States Coast Guard picked you up at sea, you are going to be sent back. And the Cuban government now made a commitment that they would accept those folks. The other part of it was the United States government committed to awarding 20,000 visas a year for legal migration of Cubans to try to create a more above board pathway. which when you think about like that visa allowance for the population size of Cuba is very generous compared to the visa allowances for legal migration in other much larger countries especially in Latin America So wet foot dry foot is often talked about as this kind of again sort of permissive or generous policy toward Cubans. And it was. Like, if you could get to the United States, you were still, you're good as gold. But it actually represented like a step back from the even more generous policy that had existed by and large before that point. When we come back. The Obama administration makes the boldest move of any U.S. president since Jimmy Carter to try to normalize diplomatic ties with Cuba, to try to sort of bury the last vestige of the Cold War in the Americas. How President Obama set the stage for Trump's ramped up deportations today. Gene, just Gene this week, code switch. I've been talking to the historian Michael Bustamante about the relationship between the United States and Cuba over the last few decades and how that's played out in the lives of the many people moving between these two countries. So we heard earlier about how the Clinton administration put this policy called wet foot dry foot in the place in the 1990s. But in 2017, a different Democratic administration put an end to it. In the second Obama term, the Obama administration makes the boldest move of any U.S. president since Jimmy Carter to try to normalize diplomatic ties with Cuba, to try to sort of bury the last vestige of the Cold War in the Americas, as Obama himself said in a speech in Havana. I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas. I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people. Obama's hands are tied to some degrees because by that point, in fact, in the 1990s, Congress had codified a big part of the U.S. embargo and set a very strict series of conditions in which the executive branch could actually fully lift the embargo. But nonetheless, the president had the power to kind of poke holes in it, and Obama did that. And so there was this huge kind of sense of excitement and optimism at the time, and I saw it because I was in Cuba a lot in those years. There were also economic reforms happening in Cuba. There was a sort of sense that things are moving in some sort of imperfect but hopefully positive direction in terms of Cuba kind of leaving behind some of the taboos of its own ideological system in the United States, no longer being quite so punitive. And hopefully those things working in tandem to kind of bridge a gap and kind of move the country forward. And so when that was happening, you know, people started to wonder, Cubans first and foremost, well, if the United States and Cuban governments are suddenly like getting along and we're now opening official embassies and, you know, Obama comes to Havana in 2016 in this sort of historic visit. People start to say, well, OK, this sort of exceptional pathway that Cubans have had into the U.S. immigration system that is a product of the historic enmity between our governments, then this is probably going to go away. So basically they're like saying, if the United States and Cuba are playing nice together, then we don't need these separate special considerations that Cuban migrants to the United States gets. If we just have normal relations with the U.S., we have normal pathways into the U.S. like everyone else. There had long been a debate from other corners of the kind of immigration policy conversation that why is the pathway for Cubans so unique when, you know, Cubans don't have a monopoly on injustice, that they're seeking to escape from their country's origin. You know, is what a Cuban is suffering, you know, sort of worse than what someone from El Salvador who's fleeing gang violence is suffering? Like, how do you measure these things? That's a very fair, I think, question to ask. And it was something that the Obama administration was hearing a lot about. And then in tandem with this process of normalization, there's all of this hope. At the time, Cuba had actually a pretty significant out-migration of people saying, it's now or never, I better get out of Dodge and people flying out of the country and making their way to the US-Mexico border now by land and trying to get in. And as those numbers ticked up, I think to the tune of around 60,000 in a year, that's a combination of undocumented and legal channels of migration. It increases the pressure on the Obama administration to want to do something about this unique treatment of Cuba's in the immigration system. What's not clear to me is why they did it when they did it. Because by the time they did it, I mean, it was in the last week of the Obama administration, Trump had won the election. So they know Trump is coming in, right? They know Trump is coming in, yeah. Whether they were thinking of doing this prior to the election, I'm not sure. But after the election, suffice it to say, both the Obama administration and the Cuban government tried to sort of rush to the finish line all of these kind of pending items on the government-to-government agenda to try to lock down this normalization. thing so that the incoming administration has a harder time undoing it. And one of those things ended up being migration policy, though, in a way, this is exactly what you would expect the Trump administration to want to do, to get rid of unique pathways to migrants of any kind. These just also happen to make migrants that for a long time since at least the late 1960s had largely leaned Republican, despite the fact that it was Democratic administrations that had created all their pathways into the country to begin with. Can you say that again? Like what? If there have been democratic... I mean, think about it. It's JFK and LBJ who were president in the 60s. They create the Cuban Refugee Program. They create the Cuban Adjustment Act. The Cuban Refugee Program, there's a very good book by a colleague, Mauricio Castro at Center College, who talks about the Cuban Refugee Program as in keeping with sort of the Great Society era projects of the time. It is government intervention. to help migrants, right? Which seems so anathema to what Republicans are about, certainly these days. And so there is a kind of a historic irony where those key pathways for Cubans that were created under Democratic administrations, that somehow the Democratic Party wasn't able to seize on that for political purposes. And the Cuban community over time aligned with the Republican Party for lots of complicated reasons, but part of it has to do with also the sort of sense among Cuban migrants that, especially that early generation that the Democrats had not done enough to help unseat Castro to begin with, and that they had betrayed their own cause by sort of not finishing the job, whether that was at the Bay of Pigs invasion or the wider series of sort of co-production programs, or whether it was JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis pledging to Khrushchev that he was not going to invade Cuba if Khrushchev pulled the missiles out of Cuba, right? And so there's a that Republican political operators starting in the 1960s are very successful at using those things as a way to create an enduring constituency among the Cuban community for the Republican Party and its harder line kind of anti-communist politics. COVID was another giant inflection point. It hit the island really hard. It tanked the tourism economy, the government tightened travel in and out even more. And so there's been this huge recent surge of people from the island to the U.S. And I'm wondering how the people who've come have been navigating the current anti-immigrant politics of this administration. Yeah, so you're right. I mean, Cuba since 2020 and particularly since 2021, when Cuba itself was on lockdown in terms of travel stuff, and then it opened its borders in late 2021. And since then, through the early part of 2025, the estimates vary. But on the low end, over a million Cubans left. And we know for a fact that 850,000, give or take, ended up in the U.S. Which is a huge number. It's a gigantic number. It is the largest exodus of Cubans ever, both in raw numbers and then as a percentage of the population. Wow. So this is more Cubans as a percentage of the population than left in the fabled 1960s in the early exile moment when my grandparents came. How many people live on the island now? I'm starting to do the math. Before this point, before COVID, the typical number that was cited for the population was around 11 million, though I think it had dipped a little bit below. Although the population is thought to be somewhere between 8 and 9 million now. So if the population is between 8 and 9 million, we're talking about like 10% of the population. Correct. Wow. Or more. That is a bananas number. Sorry. Wow. It is absolutely bananas. And it reflects, I mean, there's a longer story there about a deep economic crisis in Cuba that begins before COVID, gets worse with COVID. It also has to do with the shift from Obama administration kind of normalization policies to Trump one and now Trump to you know return to kind of hard line sanctions policies and the effects that those have along with the Cuban government own reticence to reform their economy let alone their political system So it a mess And 850 people came to the United States but they arriving at a time when the immigration policy game has changed for them Because wet foot, dry foot is no more. And I think also in the Cuban population, this latest exodus has also proven that there was a kind of a residual hope or expectation that the United States is still the United States, and they've accepted so many Cubans in the past. And I may have some vague notion that, you know, the rules have changed, but, you know, I'm going to go for it. And so they're arriving under the Biden administration and the Biden approach was very haphazard. I mean, in part, I'm grateful for it because it wasn't just punitive and, you know, sending all these people to attention, but, you know, some people got at the border, something called humanitarian parole, which is like the equivalent thing that my grandfather got in his passport when he showed up in 1962. So a lot of people have gotten access to that. The problem was that there was a whole bunch of other people who didn't get that status or treatment at the border. And while they were not sent in mass to something like immigration detention, they were given these sort of under indetermined statuses. And we don't know what sort of rubric they were using to say like, okay, this person gets parole, this humanitarian parole, this person. There was no rubric from everything I've heard. There was no sort of standard of rubric. It was luck. It was, you know, the mood of the official you were dealing with i mean there's cases of people who cross with a brother or a you know a girlfriend or whatever and one person got one status and the other person got another i mean there's sort of no right no rhyme or reason and so um it's it's luck of the draw and unlike you know almost every generation of cuban migrants prior to them with the exception of that small group of mariel migrants from 1980 who were never deemed admissible these folks are kind of here in limbo and but also the Cuban government won't take deportees en masse, you know? And as some of these folks have continued to report to immigration court or try to file asylum claims and things like that, particularly in the early part of 2025, they were getting detained and in some cases deported. The idea that you were given this parole status, you get to a year and one day and you can apply for a green card. And the Trump administration said, nah, we can just take that away from you. We can just like retroactively revoke that from you. Yeah, and it's all about the date that you got here. And so this is the other thing. Like all of these folks are – the way to forward is to try to apply for asylum. But asylum is an incredibly difficult bar to meet. And the percentage of immigrants in general or asylum applicants who actually get asylum is insanely low, right? But among nationalities, Cubans have better chances because of the nature of the political system in Cuba and real stories of political repression with which some migrants arrive. but there's a lot of folks who leave cuba because they have a kind of more generalized dissent or political discontent where they're they're economically in a difficult situation but it doesn't meet that bar that you faced a narrow direct targeted kind of persecution and so for those folks getting asylum is really difficult and the irony is that my grandparents never had to meet that bar right my grandparents never had to prove to a judge that they faced a specific form of persecution and if they had they probably wouldn't have gotten it but it was the height of the Cold War. And so they were all refugees by default. It's a real political wedge in a wider community that has prided itself for so long as being a refuge for future generations of folks who have come fleeing the very thing that they fled. But that also has aligned itself to a political party that is behind this very immigration agenda. And so, you know, it has led to a lot of debate and a lot of tension, you know, within the community itself. I mean, you anticipated my next question because I was going to hate to turn this into a crude conversation about American electoral politics, but Cuban-Americans are often thought of as this stolid, staunchly Republican voting bloc, even though that's a much more recent phenomenon than I think we realize. But how do you think Trump's mass deportation, he's deporting Cubans at record numbers, is likely to play out at the voting booth? Because obviously the people who can vote are not dealing with the sort of immediate, to themselves anyway, maybe to relatives and to people that they love, immediate to themselves implications of the threat of deportation? Yeah, I think it's an open question. I mean, my sense is that this was creating a degree of discomfort in the community, particularly for local political representatives who hail from the Cuban American community themselves. But there's also something more subtle that's happened to on the part of kind of an older core of the Cuban community in South Florida that's maybe a descendant of that earlier exile community like I am, frankly, right? This sort of increasing willingness of some folks to say out loud that thing that I think was always deemed sort of beyond a line that you couldn't say, which is that actually maybe leaving Cuba is not a good idea. And that maybe the fact that the United States has let so many Cubans in all along has been the United States sort of shooting itself in the foot from trying to apply a strategy of maximum pressure via sanctions to provoke the end of the Cuban government. The logic being, if your goal with something like the embargo or some of the things that the Trump administration is doing right now is to sort of make the economy scream or so that the kettle in Cuba steams and screams and then explodes, right, in some kind of change of government. If you're creating this massive channel for people to migrate to the United States, you're defeating the purpose of the strategy. But to say that as a Cuban-American politician, when you yourself came through that channel or you're the child of someone who did is a little bit like, you know, it's the classic, are you really going to say out loud that you want to pull the ladder up behind you in service of a foreign policy agenda, you know, let alone an immigration policy agenda. But what's changed is exactly that. People are saying that more out loud. And like in any immigrant community, that's also mixed with this kind of discourse of, well, you know, the Cubans who are coming now, they're not like we were. And so that becomes a way to deflect some feelings of perhaps responsibility or guilt from what's happening to this community now. The one thing that's different, though, is that in 2021, right before this exodus began, there was a major significant event in Cuba, which was the largest mass protest in the island's history since the revolution. In July of 2021, Cubans in more than 50 towns and cities took the streets in unprecedented mass protests. It didn't change the political situation, but it was really like a watershed moment. And about a thousand of those largely kids were thrown in jail. And then a lot of them, a lot of folks who participated in that movement saw that repression and then said, OK, I got to get out. And so there is, I think, a general sympathy and understanding that a lot of folks who left Cuba recently, you know, did have their necks on the line in Cuba and that maybe are worthy of support. Right at the moment, it's a little bit playing second fiddle in light of everything else that's happened. The ouster of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, the sort of sky high expectations that Cuba is going to be next. And I think in the last few weeks, more people are maybe willing to give a pass to the immigration stuff where it's kind of it's been set aside a little bit in the conversation. But I think it will come back because I think the subtext for this administration, at least a part of it, is that if you can topple these governments that have been so stingy on accepting deportees, part of the logic of regime change in a place like Cuba is getting a more pliant government that would accept more deportees. And so then if that ever happens, then the issue is going to come back. Because even in a day after in Cuba where there's regime change and democracy and all of that, like how many people who have come and started new lives here are really going to want to go back? And that's going to be a really tough conversation for the community too. Michael Bustamante is a historian at the University of Miami. He recently wrote a piece for public books called Will Cuban Americans Choose Trumpism or Solidarity? Thank you, Michael. Thank you. And that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR Codeswitch. If email's more your thing, ours is codeswitch at NPR.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app, or, you know, wherever it is you get your podcast. You can also subscribe to the Codeswitch newsletter by going to NPR.org slash Codeswitch newsletter. And just a reminder that signing up for Codeswitch Plus is a great way to support our show and to support public media. And you get to listen to every episode sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash codeswitch. This episode you're listening to was produced by Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Jess Kung and Leah Dinella. Our engineer was Jimmy Keely. And we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the codeswitch massive. That's Christina Kala, Kayla Latimore, Dalia Mortada, B.A. Parker, and Yolanda Sanguene. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. BZO.