COMMENTARY The Cuban community is squandering the purposeful good will it should enjoy in Miami by indulging yet again in political ill will — as elections devolve into stunts and attacks related to Cuba.
As a Miami resident for three decades — meaning, in Miami years, I’m a native — I have the utmost respect for the Cuban community’s role in building this metropolis.
From banking to construction to healthcare, it’s been the key economic engine. Its music and ventanitas are our cultural cornerstones. Its consistently outsize voter turnout is a model of commitment to America’s democratic process.
Yet, in every election season, I and countless other non-Cubans — not to mention a burgeoning number of Cubans themselves — are left dumbfounded as we watch el cubanismo squander all that purposeful good will in convulsions of political ill will.
Every election cycle here ends up reminding me of that old Saturday Night Live game-show sketch, ¿Quién Es Más Macho? — Who’s More Macho? Only in Miami it would be called ¿Quién Es Más Cubano? — Who’s More Cuban?
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It’s a juvenile and civically embarrassing witch-hunting contest that dragoons Cubans and non-Cubans alike into proving who among us is more anti-comunista — as in, who heroically hates Cuba’s communist dictatorship and who heretically helps it — and only serves to tear apart the same 305 the Cuban community has otherwise done so much to put together.
And sure enough, as we approach the Nov. 3 mid-term elections, Miami is reeling from yet another shameless and pointless round of ¿Quién Es Más Cubano? — involving everything from bakeries to Brothers to the Rescue, from faux influencers to Fidel interviews.
Yes, bakeries — or the pastelito war, as it’s being called.
Instead of wrestling with mid-term issues like affordability and immigration, Miami is once again mudwrestling in McCarthyism.
Last Friday, former TV news anchor Eliott Rodriguez, the Cuban-American Democrat challenging Cuban-American Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar in Florida’s 27th District, brought House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to Cao, a Cuban-American-run Pinecrest bakery, for a traditional cafecito and a brief convo with reporters.
Rodriguez and Jeffries condemned socialism between sips. But that didn’t stop online trolls, including so-called conservative "influencer" Josue Alvarez, from virally condemning Cao for hosting Democrats — who they call socialistas by default — and betraying what one called the community’s “political boundaries.”
Echo the trolls
Cao owner Yvette Cao insists she’s nonpartisan and was simply doing the community-minded thing — which she was, just as if she’d welcomed Salazar and House Speaker Mike Johnson. The only “boundary” she crossed was ¿Quién Es Más Cubano? intolerance.
Salazar — who’s made it her tiresome trademark to gratuitously and falsely brand opponents, Rodriguez included, as socialistas — then visited another Cuban-American bakery in Miami, Vicky, as a stage to publicly echo the trolls.
So the trolls have ignited the uproar they hoped for; Cao has been bullied into apologizing. And now, less than two weeks before the midterms, instead of wrestling with issues like affordability and immigration, we’re once again — like Miami clockwork — mudwrestling in McCarthyism.
But Rodriguez isn’t innocent, either. This week he released a retaliatory ad that attacks Salazar, herself a former TV news journalist, for “cozying up” to then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in a 1995 interview.
I’ve criticized Salazar’s opponents in the past for selecting footage of that Castro conversation to make it seem as if she’s fawning over the Cuban comandante. And it’s just as disappointing to see Rodriguez go to that well, too.
But perhaps the most distressing ¿Quién Es Más Cubano? low this week was watching Florida’s Republican Attorney General, James Uthmeier, exploit the deaths of four Cuban exiles for political theater.
On Monday, Uthmeier, who’s in a tight re-election race, came to town to announce murder charges against Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl Castro, for ordering the Cuban air force’s 1996 shootdown of two small planes carrying four members of the exile humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue.
I agree that Raúl deserved the federal indictment the Trump administration brought against him back in May. But Uthmeier’s all but toothless state charges are little more than a campaign stunt — one he made sure to act out on the same day early voting began in Miami.
And it was one that too many Cuban exile leaders approved, if only because their perennial impulse is to make elections here first and foremost about Cuba and their crusade to bring down its communist regime.
I want to see the downfall of dictatorship in Cuba, too. Until then, though, I and countless others are fed up with the downfall of decency in Miami.
