I had to rattle off my family history about a dozen times when I went down to Cuba at the end of last year. The people there treated me like some kind of unicorn. As it turns out, having a mother from Isla de Pinos (which they call “de la Juventud” today, because Castro I guess) is another mark of distinction. I didn’t quite pick up what it means, but it meant something because everybody who introduced me to everybody else brought it up.

“His mother was from the island!” they said a couple times. I figured the part-Chinese and part-American parts of me would be the draw, and they were, but everybody marveled over la isla, too. Even when you’re on an island, there’s another island.

Every interaction between a Cuban and an American is fraught, but there was another layer to it with me, the unspoken thought among the folks I met and came to know there: This one actually knows how lucky he is.

It was jarring having to come back and write about Nancy Drew and Méliès and fucking Donald Duck, while we’ve got our own dictator proudly prancing about, bragging about how there’s apparently nothing he can’t get away with. Writing about movies or developing video games in my spare time increasingly feels like tap-dancing on the deck of the Titanic.

This is where I’m supposed to say that art is important, or where I’m supposed to justify what I do. I haven’t got it in me, I’m afraid. Things are terrible right now, all over, and I’m increasingly losing hope that anybody knows what to do about it, or is capable of doing it. Since the days of W., when I came of age and realized how dumb and mean-spirited the majoritarians in my country are, I’ve privately thought that the only way we can slide back from it is on the other end of true cataclysm. More and more, it looks like that’s just were we’re heading, and that the hands on the wheel won’t loosen their grip to let the rest of us steer toward something, anything else. Some even seem to want it. My grandfather, an escapee from China and from Cuba, a survivor of Castro’s gulags, taught me from a young age that I do not.

One of the first days we were over there in Cuba, we took a trip over to Manaca Iznaga, which was a sugar plantation of old, one with a great watchtower still standing there. It’s seven or eight stories up, and all the peoples of the world were gathered there having a go of the thing, scaling it and looking out over the land. It was put there to keep an eye on the slaves toiling in the fields.

It’s an evil place, if there are such things. And people just walk obliviously along now, and buy shirts and tchotchkies there, and enjoy the view. I did, too: A reed of an old woman approached me and guessed I was from Germany. I laughed and felt bad about it, and I told her where I really am from, and once again I told someone why I know Spanish. You got out, said the look on her face. And I bought the shirt off of her for $12 because I couldn’t say no to her.

They’ll do the same here, whatever may happen. Whatever people are expelled or disappeared or erased will just be nameless ones who aren’t around to talk about it. And you or me or somebody else who was around for it will see somebody who got out and wonder what it must be like.

I’ll keep on living, of course. I’ll do as I’m doing and look for ways I can help. I have so many amazing things to live for, just starting with the woman I’ve chosen to be with and the family we have together. But sometimes it helps to articulate that it’s hard and that it looks dark.