A common canard from the left is that Miami Cubans are crazed retrograde reactionaries, still pining for property they lost when the communist regime of Fidel Castro conducted wholesale expropriations against what was Cuba’s then-ample middle class in 1959.

Anyone who knows Miami Cuban Americans knows that’s false. It’s a comic-book kind of stereotype, and has its origins in the Castro propaganda machines of Cuba themselves, which consider these fellow Cubans the implacable enemy.

What’s interesting to speculate about is why it happened.

Castroite communists, being materialists, and having materialism at the bedrock of their ideology, have a vulgar obsession with goods. This comes because they look at everything in terms of commodities. Things are commodities, industrial production is commodities, people are commodities, ideas are commodities, art is commodities, the spirit is commodities.

Commodities are static. If something is viewed as a commodity, there is no such thing as adding value, through the mysterious alchemy of the human mind – through education to empower an ignorant person, or through working as a group, combining many minds, to create something that equals far more than the sum of its parts. Those alchemies add value, create wealth, and cannot be quantified. Castroites are quite opaque to this.

Instead, the Castroite mentality means that any commodity represents a fixed value and any redistribution of value can only mean a gain for one at the other’s loss. All wealth is wealth because it was taken from some place else, there is no such thing as creating wealth. That’s why Castro is unable to see anything in Miami Cubans’ opposition to him other than a supposed obsession with stuff. It’s because he doesn’t see anything at all except in material terms.

But anti-Castro Miami Cubans see things very differently. As a success story in America, they have already regained the value of their confiscated possessions by creating more value, through their minds, in conditions of freedom. They are richer now than they ever were in Cuba, which makes the issue of lost property kind of small. They have regenerated what was taken from them by Castro because they are living, and by living they are growing and by growing, they are adding value and creating wealth.

Cuba, of course, with its static Marxist interpretation of wealth and commodities, has gone from being one of the wealthiest nation in the Americas, to one of the very poorest. It is also the most unfree nation in the hemisphere. It’s what happens when you don’t see anyone as living or growing and with vast potential, but only a functional and quantitative object, a cog in a machine. In the long run, you lose even the real commodities, too.

Cuba’s real treasure is its people. As successful as Cuban Americans are in the U.S., they have recovered from all the losses of Castrodom. But the one thing they cannot regenerate is the lost lives of their loved ones, the people who were murdered by the monstrous Castro regime, some 100,000 of them over the course of the 46-year communist dictatorship. Commodities are replaceable. People are not.

Cuban-American writer La Ventanita has one of the most beautiful and powerful essays ever written on this crucial loss, an essay that will floor you for its brilliance and heart.

It’s a must-read. Read it here.