It's somewhat inevitable that this story would include politics. The life of many Cuban Americans is politics: they left their country during or after a political revolution that they either disagreed with or wanted no part of.

Part of me gets frustrated with depictions of Cuba as an evil place, as if it was somehow responsible for these problems. And there is this emphasis on Castro's Cuba, as if it was his and not a truly socialist revolution, which again it was. There is this need to think that there was this leader who caused the country to become this, not a figure that fought for its freedom against a much more oppressive regime previously.

But at the same time, real stories like this do tell you what it was like for normal, everyday people. Their lives were upended and some lives were, frankly, destroyed. But how would their lives have been under the regime of Batista? How could their lives have turned out under that? Would it have been better or worse?

Although Ferrer's article does not focus on this, that is the implicit background.her life seems to have turned out pretty good by emigrating, and her brother's clearly worse for staying, but is this a result of the difference between countries or growing up without a family because they abondoned you (that sounds harsh, but technically that is what happened). I don't know what Ferrer thinks about this, she just presents the situation how it is. I feel for her family and all that they went through. It must have been quite a difficult life.