For Cubans who think of themselves as economic immigrants, the changes in US policy will lead to a welcome normalization of their lives: it will be easier for them to visit and be visited by their families, to send cash and goods, to maintain an effective connection to their homeland. The Florida Straits where so many have perished will no longer be a cemetery but a bridge. It is even conceivable that in the not-too-distant future some may chose to commute between Cuba and South Florida, which are no more distant from each other than New York and Philadelphia.

For an older generation of emigrants,  normalization would mean, in the first and most fundamental instance, the disappearance of the regime that forced us to abandon our homeland.  One Cuban describes his arrival in the US in th 1960s.

“I left Cuba with my parents and siblings in the 1960s, when I was too young to understand the meaning of exile. I thought that we were going on vacation. But in the half-century since, I have not stopped thinking of myself as an exile. And so to the question, what will normalization mean for long-term exiles like me? – the answer is: nothing.”

These Cubans count on a Cuba which is  an open, pluralistic society.  But it will never be that. Some may always consider themselves exiles. The normalization of relations has done is to bring home, more powerfully than ever before, that the Cuban exile is a vanishing breed.

Whatever happens in Cuba in the future will have happened too late. Too many lives have been lost, too many families have been torn apart. One of the bitter facts of Cuban history is that those who were alive at the beginning of the Castro dictatorship will not be alive to celebrate its end.