On Sunday afternoon, while having lunch with my best friend, I saw on Twitter that protests were occurring all over Miami. I’d been privy to the unrest in Cuba over the lack of vaccines — or so the mainstream media was saying — but until people hit the streets in Miami, I didn’t pay much attention to what happens on the island. As a first-generation American and a child of Cuban exiles, Cuba’s political situation has always been a spectre floating on the periphery of my life. Whenever a situation on the island reverberates in Miami and the city unleashes its pent-up energy, I’m reminded that, to many Cuban-Americans, their homeland isn’t merely a ghost that haunts them on occasion but the place they never left — they’re not haunted, but possessed.

It’s difficult to explain to a non-Miamian what the city feels like in these moments when the possibility, no matter how slight, of a free Cuba materialises. This was the case on November 25, 2016, when dictator Fidel Castro finally died and the city erupted with Cubans and non-Cubans alike taking to the streets in a celebration that resembled an exorcism. It was a beautiful, joyous moment, and like all things Cuban, tinged with sadness. The tyrant was dead, yes, but so many were also thinking of all those abuelos and abuelas and tias and primos who didn’t live to see the day.

The Elian Gonzalez custody battle, which erupted after the 5-year-old was found drifting on a raft three miles off the coast of America, had a similar kind of effect. This was an extended saga that drew Cuba and its Florida exiles into conflict for months, producing some of the most iconic images of Cuban-American Miami to date. It was the first time Americans really understood that the Miami-Cuba link was an unbreakable political — and emotional — bond, made all the more tragic by the island’s proximity to Miami.