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Europe) than the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. In the 1950’s, when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, about the same number of Cubans lived in the U.S. as Americans lived in Cuba. This phenomenon was so alarming that in 1933, as a stopgap against foreign rascals horning in on the “Cuban dream,”
the Cuban government passed laws more draconian than Arizona’s and Georgia’s today: a majority of employees at all Cuban businesses had to be Cuban natives.
    Would our construction, service and hospitality industries survive the enforcement of such a law nowadays?
    In 1992 former East German dictator Erich Honecker was tried (to no avail) for the deaths of 192 Germans killed while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall. Some human-rights groups estimate that actually 300 people (out of an average East German population over the decades of 18 million) had died trying to breach the Berlin Wall or otherwise escape East Germany—no runner-up in the “quality-of-life” awards, even by Newsweek standards. (The Wall’s official name was the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.”)
    As mentioned, an estimated 70,000 people (out of an average population of seven to ten million over the decades) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba, Newsweek’s quality-of-life winner. After so many machine-gun blasts of their frontier “guards” disturbed their coastal subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the expedient of having helicopters hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, who often comprised whole families—but to hold off on shooting.
    Instead of machine-gunning the families to death as years of tradition called for, they switched to dropping sandbags onto the rickety rafts and tiny boats to demolish and sink them. Then the tiger sharks and hammerheads could do the Castroites’ deputy-work. Screams, groans and gurgles, after all, don’t carry nearly as far as machine-gun blasts.
    â€œThe best revolutionary German man I’ve ever known was Erich Honecker,” tweeted Fidel Castro on June 1, 2012 commemorating the 18 th anniversary of the East German Stalinist’s death. “I maintain feelings of profound solidarity with Honecker.”
    â€œWhat a chump,” Castro was probably thinking. “A measly 192?”
    â€œIn one week during 1962 we counted more than 400 firing-squad blasts from the execution yard below our cells,” recalled
former Cuban political prisoner and freedom-fighter Roberto Martin-Perez to this writer.
    â€œThis is the most savage kind of behavior I’ve ever heard of,” said Robert Gelbard, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Latin America during the Clinton administration. “This is even worse than what happened at the Berlin Wall!” 3 Gelbard had watched desperate Cubans trying to swim to our Guantanamo Naval Base when machine-guns opened up and the water around them frothed in white, then red.
    The corpses were retrieved by Cuban guards on boats, with the same kinds of gaff hooks the lucky contestants in the regime-sponsored “Hemingway Fishing Festival” were using in nearby waters to yank thrashing tunas and marlins aboard their Cuba-registered yachts.
    In September 2011 Spanish medical examiners found that stowaway Adonis G.B.’s throat had been crushed. He probably died on takeoff, meaning he died more quickly and painlessly than the tens of thousands of others who perished while running from Cuba’s free and fabulous health-care.
    It was a different story for the tens of thousands of dead Cuban rafters. Most of these desperate rafters probably died like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Others perished gasping and choking after their arms and legs had finally given out and they had gulped that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The Perfect