Miami pols, how can you call for democracy in Cuba, but stand with fascism in Florida? | Opinion

I hardly recognize you, Cuban-American Republican lawmakers from Miami.

You are a shameful bunch.

How can you call for democracy in Cuba with a straight face — and any measure of credibility — when you subscribe and indulge the fascist, racist impulses of Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida?

You stand on the side of censoring what groups of people, among them educators and business owners, are allowed to say about Black history and discrimination. You stand on the side of quashing minorities’ voting rights in the name of one party’s political domination and at the expense of democracy.

Those issues sound familiar?

They should: People are censored, ruled by one party and denied their rights in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

But, for you, it’s OK to do so in Florida when the tyrant of the moment is DeSantis, whose dirty work of race-baiting and electoral mischief you’re helping move along swiftly in the Legislature.

DeSantis’ redistricting scheme

In his latest effort to bypass democratic principles of electoral fairness, DeSantis has submitted to the Florida Legislature his own congressional redistricting map, which patently favors Republicans — and disenfranchises minorities.

“It reduces the number of districts in which African Americans could elect a representative of their choice by 50%, and reduces [the] voting power of Hispanic citizens despite the dramatic growth of the Hispanic population in Florida over the last 10 years,” Miami attorney Ellen Freidin, president of the advocacy group Fair Districts Now, told the Miami Herald.

How can you, the political heirs to Cubans who fought for fair representation, let down your own community and stand with DeSantis when he does something like this?

Florida’s Hispanic civic leaders of yesteryear are rolling over in their graves — and the ones still standing are disgusted at what you’re enabling.

Ambitious DeSantis is trying to stack the deck on several fronts to assure himself a Florida win if he becomes the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election. And he’s trying to ensure his reelection this fall by fear-mongering with red-meat topics that appeal to the lowest levels of xenophobia.

Doing so isn’t a clever, acceptable political strategy like you try to argue.

With his blatantly unconstitutional move to gerrymander districts himself — the maps delivered to the Senate president with a letter warning that he has the power to approve or disapprove their maps — he’s violating the state’s Fair District standards and Voting Rights Act.

How can you stand alongside of him like a collection of bobble heads?

Other Cubans fought for representation

The early civic leaders and politicians in the Cuban-American community that I reported on for decades — Republicans, Democrats and independents, side by side, and including other Hispanic allies like Miami mayor Maurice Ferré, a Puerto Rican — fought for the right to minority representation.

Theirs were long, hard-fought battles for voting rights, citizenship and districts where minorities had a fair chance to compete. And some of the same voters in DeSantis’ camp (now older, but not wiser) disparaged Cuban Americans, told us to go back to Cuba or Mexico and, when we didn’t, they fled Miami in droves.

You’re free, of course, to take whatever political position you want, but know this: You are dishonoring the civic leaders on whose shoulders you stand, those who worked hard to secure civil rights.

What’s going on in Florida under DeSantis isn’t routine partisan politics.

It’s an outright assault on democracy by a strongman with, as Vanity Fair put it, “a growing God complex,” and the state of the state — the voting restrictions you passed last session, the bill to shield dark-money donors and the racist attempt to whitewash Black history in schools — should remind you of the tyranny your parents fled.

You must not know your Cuban history very well, otherwise your conscience would be screaming at you to remember that, for leftist Fidel Castro to gain wholesale support in the population (as you’re trying to convince people is going to happen here with Democrats in charge), there was a dictator Fulgencio Batista with his 1952 coup d’état of the right.

No political courage

What is lacking in Miami is always political courage.

Why can’t you be honorable Republicans like Congresswoman Liz Cheney and your Cuban-American compatriot from Ohio, Congressman Anthony Gonzalez?

Gonzalez called former President Trump what he is, “a cancer for the country,” voted to impeach him and is not running for reelection in 2022. You must know that he was overwhelmed by threats from the kind of people with whom you stand, and he feared for the safety of his wife and children.

Where is the Anthony Gonzalez of Miami?

Nowhere to be seen, because just about every Cuban-American Republican elected official, from Congress to the Florida Legislature, is riding the wave of political convenience on Trump and DeSantis’ coattails.

Also, sad to say, some of you, too, are cut from the same superiority syndrome cloth, aren’t you?

Your spineless, discreditable behavior and meaningless grandstanding in this democracy looks even worse when truly brave and horribly repressed Cubans on the island stand up to a dictatorship.

No such luck in Miami.