re: Cuban exiles that relocated to Miami were the henchmen and elites that knew their turn had

Nope. I lived through it as an adolescent and teenager growing up in SoFla. We had Cuban friends whose parents were all middle class and left Cuba because Fidel Castro was a communist dictator. Miami/Ft. Lauderdale had a lot of cross-cultural exchange with Havana that had zero to do with wise guys and casinos. We had swimming and diving meets, baseball tournaments, tennis matches and other athletic activities plus academic exchanges. Those of our Cuban friends’ parents who had gone to college in the United States (Ga Tech, U of F, Miami, LSU, etc) got out as soon as Fidel announced he was a Marxist. In the late 1950s everyone in the West knew what came with communism and its mind numbing totalitarianism: government suppression of the truth, police state, collectivism, and nationalization of businesses. Most of those who became political refugees in the beginning of the 1960s had originally supported the revolution, but once the march toward Soviet style authoritarianism began, they left and left the island fast.