Teresita died on my birthday almost five years ago. I didn’t grow up with my older cousin — she stayed behind in Havana after the revolution and my father, her uncle, was wise enough to leave.

But when I met Teresita and her son and daughter during a monthlong reporting trip to Cuba in 2002 it was an instant connection. The grainy black-and-white photos of a beautiful teenage Teresita at my baptism, with her long black locks and beaming smile, came to life in the color of five decades of regrets.

What if she had left when my parents started making arrangements to bring her to Miami, instead of falling in love, at 18, and deciding to marry and stay? Why did she wait too long to leave during the Mariel boatlift? Why didn’t we keep in touch all those decades?

MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME

After our bittersweet encounter we tried to make up for lost time. I would send her antacids every month, and money when I could. She complained about digestive pains a lot, and after I visited her home in the historic and crumbling section of Havana and saw the filthy cistern where trucks delivered the water I had a queasy feeling about the possibilities.

Except I never realized that Teresita’s yellowish-brown color might not be from biking to her accountant’s job every day in the hot tropical sun. She had a liver disease, undiagnosed for years. When she became severely ill, I was alerted and told to send all kinds of special prescriptions. I was hunting for the medicine when the call came.

Maria Teresa Marcos had died, as so many Cubans do, because the communist island’s much-lauded healthcare system is an evil hoax.

For years she had been complaining to doctors about her digestive problems. For years they told her to try to get antacids from family or friends abroad. No scans were done. No blood tests were taken — until her liver was so dysfunctional it became her death sentence.

A transplant? For Fidel, sure. Maybe for a hard-core member of the Communist Party. But for my cousin, a typical Cuban who lived in a ramshackle building, where the top floor had crumbled and the water likely had amoebas, nada. At least she was able to bring new bed sheets to the hospital — the ones I had bought her and my cousins.

Teresita became another statistic, collateral damage in a revolution that promised elections and prosperity and delivered dictatorship and desperation.

`SICKO’ MISSES MARK

That’s the real Cuba that lefty propagandist Michael Moore doesn’t want to see. The “documentary” filmmaker of Sicko gloated about the lack of healthcare insurance for millions of Americans by taking American rescue workers with respiratory problems from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to get “free” treatment in Cuba at one of its swank hospitals that serve tourists.

The film, which was shown at Doral Middle School last week to a social studies class looking into the healthcare systems of Canada, France and Cuba, is hardly an educational tool. But perhaps the teacher had that in mind.

The school system went by the book. Students had to have signed forms from parents if they did not want to see Sicko, and two decided not to watch. What irks me is that they are still required to know what’s in the movie. How can they without watching it?

The discussion the class should have is what Sicko didn’t show. In Teresita’s memory, please do.

Your blues, author BeBe Moore Campbell famously wrote, ain’t like mine.

I’ve occasionally borrowed that phrase to explain how bigotry as experienced by majority and minority is not the same: the one has access to levers of power enabling it to express its hatred in public policy, the other has access only to fists and words. But there are times that observation is simultaneously true, and irrelevant. This is one of them.

There is, after all, a certain egalitarian outrageousness in what happened to 18-year-old Brian Milligan. Getting hit in the back of the head with a chunk of concrete is getting hit in the back of the head with a chunk of concrete, whether you are Jew or Muslim, gay or straight, black or white.

That’s reportedly what happened to Milligan the night of Aug. 18, after he walked his girlfriend to her home in their gritty Buffalo, NY., neighborhood. Milligan had headphones on, so he didn’t even hear it coming. A mob of 10 to 12 black males then stomped and kicked him and hit him with more concrete — all in the head and face, says his father, Brian, Sr., 41.

As they struck him, they taunted him. “You white motherf—–, we told you stay away from here. These are our streets. We told you stay away from our women.”

Brian, you see, is white. His girlfriend Nicola Fletcher, 18, is African-American. That difference in melanin has, they say, been a source of daily friction with a gang of black men in their neighborhood for months. She’s been shot with paintballs, they’ve both been repeatedly cursed and taunted. “They would hit on her right in front of me,” says Milligan. “They would call her baby and all that.”

Now there’s this. Brian Sr. says when he got to the hospital, he didn’t even recognize his son. “I seen a mess. I seen somebody laying there dead.”

Not quite, but close. Brian Jr. had a gash on his head that required seven staples to close. He had bleeding and swelling in his brain. His jaw and one tooth were broken. His sense of smell is gone. He has no memory of the beating.

According to media reports, blacks in the neighborhood have been conspicuous in their refusal to cooperate with investigators. While a black anti-crime group has been trying to help bring the criminals to justice, Brian Sr. says other blacks have chosen silence. “I don’t know if it’s that they’re scared or they don’t care. That’s a coin I just don’t want to toss up in the air.”

Nor do I. So let me just say this: Assuming the facts are as we have been told, this demands prosecution as a hate crime. What happened to Brian Milligan is an offense against civil society. We should all be outraged.

I loathe bigotry in all its forms, but I have a special problem with bigotry as practiced by those who, by dint of their own history, should know better. When Jews hate Muslims for their religion, when gays scorn straights for their sexual orientation, when blacks beat a white teenager for the color of his skin, it suggests people too dense to understand the moral of their own story, the meaning of their own passages. The minority is no more righteous in its hate than the majority is.

Brian, Sr., an unemployed construction worker facing a mountain of medical bills, is asking for help. A special savings account (No. 483023966528) has been set up for Brian at Bank of America under his mother’s name: Leslie Ann Milligan.

And yes, Brian and Nicola are still together. He credits her with nudging him to get his GED. “She loves me. And I love her. That’s more than anything. That sums it all up.”

Somebody thought they had a right to tell this kid where he could go and who he could see. They kicked his head in because he is.

And that’s a sadly familiar song. It is a blues we’ve heard too many times before.

Editor’s Note: For those who might wish to contribute to Brian’s fund by mail, Bank of America’s address is 6041 Transit Rd., Depew, NY, 14043.