This week marks the 25th anniversary of that coke binge of a movie, Scarface. If you listened to the film critics at the time of its release and to the self-appointed arbiters of good taste ever since, you would hardly believe that the film, with its graphic violence and debauched drug scenes, would even be remembered at this point.
And yet the story of how a Cuban thug shot his way to the top of the Miami drug world before getting machine-gunned to pieces has become a pop culture phenomenon. That's especially true among young blacks and Latinos and in the hip hop community, where the movie's popularity goes beyond ironic quoting of its many over-the-top catchphrases ("Say hello to my little friend!" says Tony Montana, brandishing a machine gun).

I, on the other hand, had lots of reasons to hate it when I first saw it as a kid. The problem was this: the movie's ruthless central character, Montana (played by Al Pacino), was Cuban like me, and like me, came on the Mariel boatlift in 1980. During that mass immigration of 125,000 Cubans to Miami, Castro surreptitiously placed about 3,000 serious criminals along with the law-abiding families leaving the island. As they continued to commit crimes in Miami, they came to represent all of us.

We "Marielitos" were considered low-lifes, and a lot of us felt like we had to work extra hard to prove people wrong. You can see why a movie that reinforced that stereotype wouldn't go over well with us. When we saw that Scarface opened with a block of text explaining the Mariel boatlift and exaggerating the number of criminals to 30,000, there was a collective, "Here we go again."

And yet, despite Pacino's ridiculous accent and overacting, and despite Montana's clichéd characterisation as an out-of-control Latin macho who loves sex, flashy clothes and tacky furniture, there is something about Scarface that makes it hard to dismiss and for me, makes it clear why so many Latino and black kids buy Scarface posters, T-shirts, deluxe DVD sets and video games, why Montana references abound in rap lyrics, why artists like Snoop Dogg and Diddy say they've seen the movie scores of times, why Scarface is their Godfather.

Crass as it may be, Scarface depicts the lurid underside of the American dream, what someone not born in a middle-class suburb might feel they have to do to achieve "money, power, respect", the three things Tony wants. It also shows the search for those things can make you lose your way. You can see that early in the movie, when an immigration official asks Tony whether he's ever been in jail. Tony sarcastically answers: "Yeah, once, for buying American dollars." Bingo.

It speaks volumes about the alienation that black and Latino kids still feel that Tony, for all his over-the-top antics, may be more real, more relatable to them than, say, a boy scout like Barack Obama. Tony is literally an alien, who comes from a place where his choices were limited. "How would you like it," he says to his immigration interrogator, "if you worked 10 hours a day and still owned nothing, if you were always been told what to do, what to think." He was talking about communist Cuba, but what Scarface posits to black and Latino kids who grow up poor and limited, or who saw their siblings or friends end up in jail instead of in college, is that America is not much different. How can they not relate to Tony's anger and frustration?

I grew up believing in American meritocracy, the idea that if you worked hard, your talent and efforts would be rewarded, you'd be able to get ahead. Obama believes in that, too – or maybe privately believes, like I do, that while it doesn't always works out that way, it's better to believe in it than not – so maybe seeing him work his way up to become the first black president will help change some of these kids' point of view. At least there are as many Obama T-shirts out there now as Scarface ones.