A new generation of Cubans is dying in the Florida Straits in a bid to flee a brutally repressive regime — and poverty, too. They’re bedfellows.

A trail of makeshift rafts and rickety boats dots high seas. A superman rides a surfboard some 90+ miles to the Keys. And, at the U.S. border with Mexico, a jam-packed queue of people asking for political asylum replaces the long wait for rationed food at the government-owned bodega in Cuba.

Desperate Cubans in risky flight — they are new protagonists in an old, sad story, a 63-year-old story that no longer stirs emotions in this country. But it should, especially given the rightful passion and outrage with which Americans are defending Ukraine.

But not all bids for freedom seem to be considered of equal value and merit — not even when both Cuba and Ukraine pose the same threat to the United States in the deranged mind of one man, Vladimir Putin, who’s pining for the Soviet Union era.

Americans think the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the two superpowers to the brink of war is a thing of the past. All they want is Obama-styled access to cruising and travel to Commie Disneyland.

Lost to Donald Trump and President Biden’s sanctions, Cuba is out of sight, out of mind. The pleas of advocates for attention to human-rights violations, censorship and judiciary secrecy are lost on American and European allies.

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