So it's understandable that, prior to 1959, most Cubans were supporters of Castro, one of the most vocal opponents of Batista.

"During the '50s, we were all glued to our shortwave radios. ... We would get news from the small army that Castro had landed. ... People collected money, clothing, medical supplies, weapons. My family collected no actual weapons, but clothing and medical supplies we collected, and we managed to smuggle it to the rebels.

"The majority of Cuba's middle-class supported Castro, and so did we."

Via Latinamericanstudies.org

Castro won, obviously. But the celebrations were short-lived, as those who'd supported him suddenly found themselves unwittingly starring in Despot III: With A Vengeance anyway.

"Thousands of people were executed over a few months' time for being counter-revolutionary. That was not something we'd ever experienced before. We'd heard the Russians did it in Germany, the Germans did it in Poland, Mao's forces in Tibet. ... We'd always thought of ourselves as an extension of the U.S. And this was totally barbaric."

In a move that surprised absolutely no one, save for ol' gullible Guillermo -- the fisherman who took an oar to the head and lost the ability to follow logical progressions -- what started with mass murder didn't end happily.

Having been born several years after Castro's rise to power, young Jose Garcia was no stranger to indoctrination. At an age when our understanding of politics came mostly from diplomatic missions to rescue Princess Peach, Garcia was already involved in political intrigue of a sort.

"Children were constantly asked to sing socialist songs and show our respect to such icons as Fidel or Che Guevara," he said. "Politics was an unavoidable fact of life, and you were expected to voluntarily get involved in the 'building of communism.' I became very aware from a very young age, probably 7 or 8 years old, that I had to play the game or suffer the consequences and be considered an anti-revolutionary or a traitor to the motherland."

Finally, Castro went for the businesses, because what were they going to do about it? Stage a fourth revolution? That's ridiculous. That ruins the whole three-act structure. It's bad storytelling!

"He intervened all non-Cuban-owned businesses on the island. ... He would intervene with landowners in farms and make them into communes. And after the farm commune process, which he called the 'agricultural revolution,' then he went into all private businesses in the city.

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"Our family were business owners; my grandfather had a grocery business. ... One day a commissioner came into my grandfather's building and said, 'This is now property of the revolution.' So my father, uncles, and grandfather just walked away. ... There was no point in any kind of resistance."

Obviously, a whole lot of people were a whole lot of unhappy with how Castro's reign was working out -- but what could they possibly do about it? Write their local official? Conduct a grassroots political campaign? Hahaha ... no. When the government starts inventing ominous doublespeak like "intervened," you're lucky if escape is even an option anymore. And yet ...

He got lucky: Thanks to Operation Pedro Pan, a joint venture between the Swiss embassy and the Catholic Church to spirit children to America, he secured permission to leave ... alone. "So I came to the U.S. without my parents and lived in a refugee camp in Florida."

Vivian's turning point came when her father refused to be a cog in Castro's propaganda machine.

"The comedy team my father wrote for, Rodriguez and Otto Sirgo, were like the Cuban Abbott and Costello. When the Cuban Ministry Of Telling People What To Do And Think Or Else told him to include pro-communist propaganda in his comedy sketches, he refused. That meant his imprisonment was imminent, and we had to flee."

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Way to stand up for the integrity of comedy, Vivian's dad! By contrast, we once got a sternly worded letter from a brand of laundry detergent and rolled over like a well-trained dog.

As Vivian's family was realizing their impending peril, Jose Garcia was still camping out somewhere deep inside his mother's left ovary. So he spent much of his youth under Castro's government ... but his parents were not at all content with keeping it that way. "Most people in those days had a deep fervor and solidarity with the revolution," he said. "But my parents dreamed of the day when we could leave the country."

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That opportunity struck on April 1, 1980, when six Cubans jumped the fence of the Peruvian embassy looking for political asylum and the opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge. Those six were soon followed by over 10,000 more, and the Mariel boatlift was born.

"The Cuban government announced that anyone who wanted to leave the country could, as long as their relatives were willing to come pick them up. As a condition, those relatives had to allow the government to fill their boats with Cuban 'undesirables,' including a few thousand convicts. This helped the government sell the image that the Mariel boatlift refugees were mostly criminals, when in reality the vast majority were average Cuban citizens that, as history has proven, were law-abiding and productive."

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Vivian's parents made becoming a political refugee sound like a trip to Disney World, because what else are you going to tell a little kid? Plus, letting on to their plan might get them disappeared.

"My parents took my brother and me into their bedroom and whispered that we were flying to the U.S., and that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES were we to tell our younger sister," she said. "They didn't tell us we were escaping from tyranny, or that Papi might get arrested. They told us we were going to Miami Beach (which was, for Cubans, a vacation spot), and that it would be a new house, and a new country, and new relatives to meet. An adventure!"

Via Palm Beach Post

Jose Garcia's "adventure" was more literal, in that it reads like an Oscar contender's screenplay.

"My Mariel story begins when an uncle went to the port to pick us up and waited there for a month. A week after he gave up and returned to the U.S., the Cuban government finally agreed to allow my family to leave.

"We waited another month for the permit. To make matters worse, my father was forced to falsify some official papers to avoid detection. As a professional accountant, he had been the vice president of a large construction company, and some of his employees had been denied the official permit to leave the country, in addition to being accused of knowing military secrets. Subsequently, he had to run a scam that included being demoted and eventually fired from his post so that he could finally request permission to leave.

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"The day we were waiting to leave my hometown for Havana, the police arrived and took my father away. I still remember my mother falling to the ground crying. By some miracle the Cuban officials were not able to discern that his papers had been falsified, and he was released but warned that they would come back for him if there were any more questions.

"The trip to the Mariel port was accompanied by the constant fear that he would be arrested again. To make matters worse, our stay at the port lasted five days as we waited for a storm to pass. We finally launched, but we had been on the ocean for only a couple of hours when our ship began taking on water and eventually sank in the Gulf Of Mexico. We only survived because a large shrimp boat came to our rescue. We arrived on June 4, 1980 -- a trip that should take six to seven hours had taken us 19."

Chuck a friendly talking whale in there, and we'd watch the hell out of that movie.