Yes, the ones that are so fondly referred to on DU as “Batistas” and “fascistas” and “racistas”.

The ones that many of you say deserve everything they got because they were fortunate not to have been living in poverty during the 1950s.

The ones that are referred to as ”Gusanos” because they chose to leave Cuba as soon as Castro declared an end to all elections in 1961.

Contrary to what is constantly being spewed on DU, most of the Cuban exiles that live in Miami were not avid Batista supporters. Many, in fact, supported Castro in toppling Batista. And most still regard Batista with disdain.

If it weren’t for the support Castro received from the Cuban bourgeois and from the elite, both who were sick of the Batista’s corruption and suppressive tactics, El Commandante would have gone down in history as a bearded footnote, a golden age GI Jose who would have either been executed or forced into exile.

If it weren’t for the fact that the majority of Cubans resented Batista for putting himself in office in a 1952 coup without an election, Castro might have never gained the support he needed from the general population.

If it weren’t for the fact that many in Batista’s regime began turning against him, especially after he ordered several teenagers hanged for trying to organize a general strike, Batista would have never been forced to flee to the Dominican Republican on the eve of the Cuban Revolution.

Not to say that some of Batista’s supporter didn’t end up in Miami. Considering that Castro started executing members of Batista’s regime in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, it’s not surprising that the first wave of Cubans who came to Miami in 1959 were from the political and military elite.

But these Cubans make up an extreme minority of the Cubans who ended up in Miami.

The second wave came in 1961 and was much larger in size. They were mostly professional and working class Cubans who did not want any part of Castro’s Marxism Revolution. And they felt betrayed with Castro’s abolishment of elections as well seizure of their private property. Especially considering how Castro vowed in 1959 that he was not a communist and that he would install a "representative and democratic government".

This second wave of Cuban immigrants were doctors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, farmers, cab drivers, mechanics, bakers and waiters. They represented a very broad segment of Cuban society. And they continued coming to Miami throughout the 1960s, settling in what became known as the Little Havana neighborhood.

The third wave of Cubans came during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift; 125,000 Cubans in six months, 25,000 whom Castro had released from Cuban prisons and mental institutes.

The fourth wave of Cubans came in 1993 during the "special period" when Cuba was struggling in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And the fifth and current wave has been occurring since 2000 when more than 130,000 Cubans have settled in Miami, most of them arriving after winning a visa lottery, some of them arriving on rafts and makeshift boats.

Now just because the majority of Miami Cubans never supported Batista doesn't mean they don't tend to vote republican. We all know they do.

The Kennedy Bay of Pigs fiasco was one of the major factors in turning them against the democratic party. But the other factor was that back in the 1960s and 1970s, when southern democrats ruled Florida and were not exactly warming up to the Cubans, the republican party allowed the Cubans to gain a political foothold in Miami, which they have not relinquished. Even if it means voting against their interests as most Cubans are working class.

So the majority of Miami Cubans may be politically ignorant, but they were not Batista supporters. Nor were they particularly responsible for keeping a large segment of Cuba’s black population socially and economically repressed; anymore than your family was responsible for keeping a large segment of America’s black population repressed before the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

Saying that every Cuban exile was part of the Cuban elite that repressed poor Cubans is like saying that every white person in the South owned slaves prior to the Civil War. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I wonder how your (white) family would have reacted if JFK would had swooped in during his Civil Rights Agenda and forced them out of their homes, seizing all their land and assets they had accumulated through years of hard work and inheritances (the hand-me-downs that come with the privilege of being born white).

I wonder if you would say your family “deserved” what they got because they happened to be living comfortably in the United States while blacks were oppressed, segregated and mired in poverty.

I wonder if you would say they had it coming because they had turned a blind eye towards the inequality between the races, perhaps not necessarily out of contempt and maliciousness, but out of denial that these injustices even existed.

And I wonder what you would do if the right-wingers steal another election in 2006, essentially abolishing elections like Castro did in 1961 and Batista did in 1952.

Would you, as so many of you vow, move to Canada as a political exile?