If you'd told my grandparents in 1958 Havana that the most pro-capitalist, pro-US, highest-living-standard country in Latin America--the country they'd left Europe for--was soon to become a totalitarian Soviet proxy state and eventually a destitute ruin, they'd have laughed.

And yet there they were 2 years later putting their children on flights in a panic while gleeful mobs of violent zealots called for 'paredón!' ('the big wall', as for a firing squad) for some state enemy, while burying or bartering valuables and trying to get themselves out.

There must be something epigenetic about being the descendent of refugees and the victims of a revolution that means you imagine catastrophic upheaval better than most, despite not having lived it. Something about the constant dinnertime stories, the faded photos of a lost world.