This rueful joke has made its way around Cuba for decades: A foreign tourist, soaking up what he thinks are the advances of the communist revolution, stops a kid in the street for a chat.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” the visitor asks.
“A foreigner,” answers the young Cuban.
Morbid humor has long been the staple of communist regimes, from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, from China to the once-prosperous Caribbean island of Cuba.
People who have lived through communism, with its alternating bouts of horrors and tedium, say it is one way to deal with such surreal surroundings.
But today, the joke meant to pour scorn on Cuba’s miserable conditions has become reality: Between 2022 and 2023, 10% of all Cubans have fled their socialist paradise to live elsewhere.
That’s more than one million people, and most of them have come to the United States, courtesy of President Biden’s open-border policies and the miserable record of his “border czar,” Vice President Kamala Harris.
They’re not just washing ashore in Florida; many, many Cubans are showing up at the southern border and waltzing right in.
These sad demographic facts were announced last week by Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the head of the Cuba’s National Statistics and Information Office, at what The Miami Herald described as a “somber moment” during a session of the rubber-stamp National Assembly.
It gets worse: The flight of 1,011,269 desperate Cubans contributed the lion’s share to the island’s massive drop in population, but wasn’t the only factor.
Deaths far outnumbered births in Cuba in 2022 — 405,512 deaths versus 284,900 births.
It appears that the woeful medical conditions on the island with “free health care,” combined with such hopelessness that couples no longer want to have children, have also shrunk Cuba’s population.
To make matters even more dire, the country’s socialist leaders have decided to double down on central planning, cracking down on what little of the private sector exists in Cuba, the Herald reported.
Cuba had already lost well over a million of her sons and daughters following the communist takeover in 1959.
Until then, Cuba had been a place of immigrants, not a country of emigrants.
Close to 800,000 Spaniards went to Cuba in the first three decades of the 20th century, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
They followed other hundreds of thousands who went to the island in the last half of the 19th century, during Europe’s great outward migration.
For a small example, 13 of my 16 great-great-grandparents were born in either Spain or France.
Angel Castro, father of longtime tyrants Fidel and Raul Castro, was another one of those Spaniards (one who obviously should have stayed put).
But what European in his right mind would emigrate to Cuba today?
Who, of any country?
Haiti, where cannibal gangs roam the streets, is 50 miles away.
There are no Haitian immigrants to Cuba.
Meanwhile, Democrats have created a powerful pull factor.
While political and economic conditions are awful in Cuba, they have been for over six decades.
But since Biden took office and created a mass legal parole program that allows anyone to come to the United States, the exodus from Cuba has exploded.
Some 645,122 Cubans have entered the under Biden’s program, according to reports. And that’s not counting unknown numbers of “gotaways.”
“We have no idea who some of these people are. We have no idea if they have criminal records,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on the Senate floor this month.
And the illegal entrants are receiving generous benefits — infuriating immigrants who did it the right way, Rubio noted.
“One of the things I see a lot in South Florida are people that have been in this country, maybe they came from Cuba 45 years ago, they’ve worked here their entire lives,” the senator, the son of Cuban immigrants, said.
“And then they run into somebody who just got here from Cuba three months ago, who’s 29 years old, doesn’t work, and is given $1,500 a month in benefits by our government because they’re a refugee. That refugee, a year later, is traveling back to Cuba 15 times.”
Nobody understands better than an American of Cuban ancestry the dire conditions of communism.
But the mess that Biden and Harris have created fixes things for nobody, least of all the little Cuban boy in the old joke.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the co-author of “NextGen Marxism.”