It’s my long-but barely held together theory that the descendants of the Diaspora—no, not a Diaspora, but the Diaspora—are hellbent on remaking America in the image of 1957 Fulgencio Batista’s Havana. Think about it: a glossy, neon-lit illusion of freedom where vice reigns supreme, the rich ride roughshod over the poor, and every two-bit hustler with a flashy smile and a sharper knife sells you something you didn’t know you needed—be it cigars, fake revolutions, or atomic-age dreams of technicolor utopia.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s fact. Open your eyes. You can see it in the glass towers springing up like weeds along every coast, in the velvet-lined booths of high-end strip clubs where champagne flows like the Rio Grande after a thunderstorm. You can feel it in the way politics has turned into a boxing match in a casino pit—rigged, but with just enough blood and flash to keep the crowd cheering.

The children of the Latin-American exodus, scattered across the US by dictators, revolutions, and the cold machinery of capital, are now returning to build an empire of excess. It’s all about the grift, the graft, and the gamble—a system Batista would’ve tipped his hat to. These are people who understand that the house always wins, so why not own the house? The casinos, the skyscrapers, the data farms, the cryptocurrency exchanges—they’re all just casinos with different sets of dice.

The comparison writes itself: Havana 1957, a sweaty, smoke-filled Eden of sin, where the air reeked of rum, cheap perfume, and cold cash, every corner lit by flickering neon and every backroom a stage for whispered deals and the shuffle of marked cards. And then, picture this—Trump, bloated and manic, stepping onto the stage on Inauguration Day like a washed-up casino boss who still thinks he’s holding the keys to the kingdom. Instead of inaugurating policy or promise, he throws up a goddamn shitcoin—a greasy, virtual IOU backed by the full faith and credit of delusion. Where Batista sold dreams of luxury and decadence to wealthy tourists while bleeding the streets dry, Trump sold a hologram of nostalgia wrapped in gold leaf, promising his faithful gamblers a golden ticket to 1957, minus the rhythm and soul. The grift is the same, only now it’s coded into a blockchain—casino chips replaced with digital breadcrumbs leading straight to the same house, the same pit, the same rigged game. Havana had roulette wheels; Trump had Reddit threads. The stakes haven’t changed, only the suckers have.

America, once a frontier of the mind, now reduced to a sandbox for oligarchs and their algorithms. The dream is sold back to the desperate masses in bite-sized portions, just enough to keep them hooked: a dopamine hit here, a lottery ticket there. The people are pacified with shiny gadgets and empty promises while the puppet masters rewrite the rules, carving out a playground for the elite few who know the secret handshake and speak the lingua franca of offshore bank accounts.

But it’s not just greed. No, there’s nostalgia at play here—a longing for a world that never really existed, except in the grainy, cigarette-smoke-stained reels of memory. Batista’s Havana wasn’t a paradise. It was a gilded cage. But nostalgia doesn’t care about the truth. It only cares about the feeling—the buzz, the rush, the glamour of it all. It’s the American way, after all: to mythologize the past and then recreate it as a theme park.

This isn’t progress. It’s retrograde motion in a Cadillac with fins, racing back to the 1950s while pretending the road isn’t crumbling beneath the wheels. It’s Hunter Thompson’s nightmare of the American Dream, but with a glossier coat of paint and a Cuban soundtrack. The Rama Diary on a bad acid trip.

And somewhere, in the haze of cigar smoke and the neon glow of a thousand LED billboards, Batista is laughing. Or maybe it’s crying. Maybe there’s no difference anymore. America, my friend, is a game rigged by exiles and dreamers who’ve mistaken the past for the future. And the rest of us? We’re just along for the ride, barreling down the highway to nowhere with the radio tuned to static.