“The Eastern variety imprisons, persecutes and mortifies the body but at least does not destroy hope. Its Western counterpart ends up creating happy robots. It is an air-conditioned hell. It kills the soul.” – Alain de Benoist

Fidel Castro is dead.

I see people celebrating all over Facebook and Twitter. I would also like to celebrate the death of the world’s longest surviving communist dictator, but I can’t get in the Cold War spirit. It’s not because I like Castro or Cuba under communism. It is because I hate what Florida has become.

Just 36 percent of Floridians were born in the state. Even that number is exaggerated because it counts as natives people whose parents recently immigrated to the state. Of all the states in the country, only Nevada has fewer native born residents. In the late 20th century, the native Florida Cracker was utterly overwhelmed by immigrants from all parts of United States and Latin America.

South Florida has become culturally alien to the rest of the South. There are twice as many Jews in Palm Beach County alone as there are in the entire state of Texas. Florida now hosts much of Puerto Rico in the Orlando area and there was a lot of speculation about whether Puerto Ricans would be Hillary Clinton’s secret weapon in the November election. There is also a large Haitian population in Miami.

Florida’s New South “Open For Business” motto and tax laws have played a major role in attracting the flood of transplants. The Villages is the largest retirement community in the world. Everywhere you go in Florida now you will find signs that the natives have been overwhelmed. Closer to home, the Redneck Rivera of my youth has been erased over the last 15 years as it has been transformed by expensive, high rise condos. That’s the way it is now all over the Panhandle from Panama City to Pensacola.

Shouldn’t we be hailing the progress that capitalism has brought to Florida? The Sunshine State has become in many ways what Cuba was before Castro: a playground for wealthy transplants and aliens. The political and economic power in Florida has been wrested from the hands of the people who are from Florida. When I look at Cubans putting around in their antique cars in Havana and compare it to what I see in Orlando, I can’t help but notice that Cubans have retained more of their national character.

It’s like comparing France or Germany under Western capitalism to Poland or Hungary under Soviet communism. I can’t help but ask myself: both of these are awful systems, but who got the worst of it when it was all over? Are both systems equally bad? Sure, we’ve got a Burger King off every other interstate exit in Florida and no one is being executed by the state, but we have lost something even more valuable.

Welcome to Florida, the unsettled, air-conditioned hell of anomie.