There are few Spanish-language news outlets you can trust more than the independent Cuban online newspaper 14ymedio. And there are few Spanish-language media figures you should trust less than YouTube influencer Alex Otaola.
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14ymedio has a laudable habit of angering both the communist regime in Havana and hardline exiles in Miami. Since Russia began its Hitleresque invasion of Ukraine last week, 14ymedio has been critical of Cuba’s support of Russian butcher-in-chief Vladimir Putin — but also of former President Donald Trump’s own demented praise of Putin.
Cuban exile Trump groupies like Otaola want to flush away that last part like classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. On his YouTube show ¡Hola Otaola!, Otaola won’t acknowledge the creepy adulation Trump has heaped on Putin’s Ukrainian blitzkrieg — like calling the Monster of Moscow a “savvy genius peacekeeper” whose medieval m.o. would work great on the U.S. southern border. ¡Hola Otaola!’s Twitter account, meanwhile, is a platform for denying Trump’s long-standing Putin passion — and for demonizing media like 14ymedio that report it.
“This is false,” one Otaola retweet claims about Trump extolling Putin’s putsch — even though you can upload itanywhere — while absurdly accusing 14ymedio of being a shill for the Cuban regime.
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Since Putin’s tanks started rolling into Ukraine, this has been the typically, shamelessly and dangerously hypocritical pattern we’ve seen from the Spanish-language media here in Miami — the folks who decry Putin's protection of the socialist dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. And that pathetic Trumputin double standard coursing through South Florida’s right-wing Spanish-language airwaves and cyberspace is the kind of favor Putin was betting on.
Take Actualidad Radio’s Trump high priestess Carinés Moncada — the popular Venezuelan talk show host who calls the Black Lives Matter racial justice movement a “Satanic cult.” Like Otaola, Moncada has condemned Putin’s Ukraine destruction but refuses to condemn Trump’s applauding it.
The Trumputin duplicity so many South Florida Latinos are committing is meant to make people forget that while Trump was coddling Putin, Russia's thug influence in the Americas grew.
Like all Trump toadies right now, Moncada needs to deflect her listeners from the Trumputin bromance. From the fact that Putin likely delayed his Ukraine attack when Trump was President — not because he feared Trump, but because all the brown-nosing Vladimir the Terrible enjoyed from Donald the Obsequious made him believe the U.S. would help him dislodge Ukraine’s westernized government by other means.
So, of course, Moncada instead blames the Ukraine slaughter on President Biden: “The Ukrainian people will spend the weekend terrorized by the inability of Joe Biden to maintain world peace,” Moncada ludicrously tweeted last Friday. Otaola’s show one-upped her on the Trumpaganda front by flashing a picture of Biden eating an ice-cream cone alongside a video of Trump at the arch-conservative CPAC gathering last weekend bragging that he’s the only 21st-century U.S. prez who never had a Putinvasion occur on his watch.
TROIKA OF TYRANNY
But why is this duplicity also dangerous? Because it encourages the large swath of the Republican Party that still worships Trump — which includes a large swath of South Florida Latinos — to reassure themselves before they go to bed each night that while it’s OK to protest Putin’s evil in Ukraine, it’s somehow OK at the same time to wink and nod and actually admire Putin the oily way Trump does.
That not only helps sanitize Trump’s abominable affection for Putin. In this hemisphere it helps people forget that while Trump was coddling Putin, Russia’s thug assistance to thug regimes in Havana, Caracas and Managua was growing. While Trump altar servers like Otaola and Moncada try to cast Biden as a 21st-century Neville Chamberlain, they obscure the reality that the economic sanctions Biden and the E.U. are slapping on Russia also hurt Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — as my colleague Antonio Maria Delgado reports this weekin the Miami Herald.
Delgado smartly points out, for example, that those autocracies, which Trump himself dubbed Latin America’s “troika of tyranny,” have in recent years begun using Russia’s financial system to skirt the targeted sanctions the U.S. and E.U. have imposed on them. The jail cell the U.S. and E.U. are now building around the Russian ruble makes that a lot less possible to do.
Which is precisely what so many Spanish-language media in Miami don’t want their readers, listeners and viewers to ponder. They’re so slavishly invested in Trump, they’ll never acknowledge how slavishly invested Trump is in Putin.
