It's easy to forget the cost of prosperity to those who were not prosperous. Pre-Castro Cuba was rife with racism and inequality, extreme and abject poverty, a segregated society, under violently repressive and corrupt governments.

I can't say anything about your experience, but I can share something about my childhood in Brazil. A middle-class home, private school, private health-care family under a brutal US-sponsored military dictatorship. I never even suspected people were getting arrested and murdered for criticizing the government. I enjoyed the military parades. It never occurred to me that public school was really bad, that not every kid had access to it (most didn't), that unless you had a stable job (and, once labeled a subversive, that was mostly impossible), you had absolutely no health care. The cost of my happy childhood completely eluded me until I was an adult.