“Wonder why the Cubans in Miami agree with the embargo? Maybe because they were driven out of their own country by a totalitarian regime”, is a popular rightwing claim. “Saddam helped plan 9/11” is another. Perhaps “monkeys fly out of my arse” could become a third.

The Saddam claim has been utterly, comprehensively destroyed, and anyone who still believes it can be rejected offhand as an idiot or a maniac. The Miami Cubans claim needs more refutation.

Cubans in Miami are mostly economic opportunists, like any migrant to America. This is all well and good. Unfortunately, an immigrant community’s political leanings tend to be shaped by the people in the community who care about that sort of thing, rather than about making cash for their families. In Miami, these people are almost all half-crazed rightwing ideologues.

Some of these left Cuba because they couldn’t bear to live in a country with universal healthcare and a good public education system; others left because Fidel Castro (in possibly the most amusingly cynical thing any leader has ever done) deliberately sent boatloads of Cuban criminals and mentally ill people to Miami to get them out of the way.

Mr Castro is a relatively nasty piece of work (although Cuba, unlike much of Central America, has been devoid of starvation, war and nun-raping death squads for the last 30 years). But talking bollocks about how evil and North Korea-y his country is serves no purpose whatsoever. I, and plenty of people I know have been there; there’s a lot of poverty, but everyone is well-fed, well-educated, and well-, erm, -healthcared – not just in Havana city, but in small villages throughout the country.

I’ll leave someone else to refute the “monkeys fly out of my arse” claim.