Florida suffers from a problem greater than its infestation of Burmese pythons and bi-annual plague of love bugs. Right-wing Republican Cuban-Americans, whose Fulgencio Batista-supporting parents and grandparents were welcomed with open arms by the Central Intelligence Agency, have found the perfect home in the fascist Republican Party and, by default, Florida political power.
Today, these fascist-oriented Cuban-Americans, display “Trump 2024″ signs and banners. They have replaced “Cuba Si! Obama No!” and “Death to Castro” signs in the Cuban neighborhoods of south Florida. These nostalgic dreamers of the days of Batista have gotten one of their wishes: Democrats and other progressive groups protesting Florida’s tin-horn version of a Latin American caudillo, Ron DeSantis, face newly-enacted felony convictions if found guilty of “blocking traffic” or being “too noisy,” Although DeSantis insists that he is an Italian-American, whose family comes from Jacksonville, Florida, Tampa-based mobsters Santo Trafficante, Sr. and Santo Trafficante, Jr. were Italians, but by way of Cuba. Nevertheless, DeSantis has ensured fascistic Republican Cubans now occupy the posts of Lieutenant Governor (Jeanette Nuñez) and another seat on the Florida Supreme Court (John D. Couriel). DeSantis’s appointment of Nicaraguan-American Carlos Muñiz to the Supreme Court also represented a sharp rightward shift for the court: Muñiz’s father was a supporter of the anti-Communist “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua fighting the Sandinista government. The Nicaraguan fascists and arms and drug smugglers lost their criminal war and the CIA, as it did with thousands of Cubans, welcomed the “Contras” to south Florida, where they politically integrated into the Latin American fascist tendencies of the Cuban expats and their families.
Capping off Florida’s drift toward fascism is U.S. Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio offers up the bullshit story about his parents “fleeing” Cuba to avoid the Communist takeover. Not a very good student of Cuban history, Rubio fails to mention that his parents willingly left Cuba in 1956. Fidel Castro and his Communist forces did not take over power in Havana until 1959. Rubio’s parents were not political refugees, but economic refugees, in other words, the sort of people Rubio now rails against for trying to enter the United States from Mexico using America’s political asylum laws.
Some of the current crop of Cuban Republicans in Florida have abandoned the Roman Catholic Church, opting for Spanish-language Pentecostal and Dominionist mega-churches and super-churches like the Purifying Fire Ministries of Dallas run by Reverend Rafael Cruz, the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Pastor Cruz is another Cuban who falsely states he fled Communism in Cuba. The elder Cruz left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas, a full two years before Castro came to power. No wonder so many Cuban-Americans have found a home in GOP politics. They equally lie with great gusto. It is also noteworthy to point out that Purifying Fire Ministries was founded in Costa Mesa, California by Suzanne Hinn, the now-divorced wife of “faith healer” and con-artist Benny Hinn. The shift of the Cuban Right in the United States from Catholicism to fundamentalist con-artistry also explains why the Qanon conspiracy nonsense has taken hold among the Cuban and other right-wing Latin American expat communities of south and central Florida.
Florida’s other lackluster U.S. senator, Rick Scott, was quick to appoint another right-wing Cuban-American, Carlos Lopez-Cantera, to fill the unexpired term of GOP African-American Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll, who resigned in 2013 amid a financial and tax scandal. The GOP Diaz-Balart brothers — U.S. Representative Mario Diaz-Balart and former U.S. Representative Lincoln Rafael Díaz-Balart — remain a powerful political duo in south Florida.
The Florida Democratic Party, always willing to miss an opportunity, wrongfully believes that the Cuban vote can be lured its way. Nothing can be further from the truth as the 2020 statewide election showed. In 2020, Trump gained support from his 2016 totals in the Cuban wards of Miami Dade, including Hialeah. Trump’s success in the state that he now calls home is now in danger of being transferred to his useless son, Donald Trump, Jr., grifting daughter, Ivanka Trump, and slimed-up son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who have all relocated to south Florida from New York.
Florida Democrats should focus their efforts on three important emerging voting blocs in the state: in central Florida and the Haitian-American and British West Indian-American communities of south Florida. The overall voting numbers for these more likely Democrats exceed those of the wealthier but less numerous Republican-supporting Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Brazilian, and Colombian voters. The Venezuelan expats of Doral, where Trump’s golf course and hotel are located, would be relegated politically meaningless, if Democrats moved to ensure all Puerto Ricans and eligible Haitian, Jamaican, Barbadian, and other Caribbean-Americans are registered to vote in the state, notwithstanding new Batista-like voting restrictions put in place by DeSantis to stymie suffrage for African-American and other minority voters.
The GOP Cuban-Americans, never able to realize the return of a fascist dictatorship in their native Cuba, are establishing one in Florida. It is overseen by the rambling and bumbling “Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago,” Donald Trump, and a cabalistic alliance of the Cubanos of south Florida, other right-wing Latin American wealthy expats safely bivouacked in their gated nests, the Bible thumpers of the Florida Panhandle (represented by the sex pervert Matt Gaetz), and slimy political operatives like Roger Stone and Doug Logan. The latter is the chief of the Sarasota-based “election audit” firm “Cyber Ninjas,” currently wreaking havoc in another state plagued by Trumpism, Arizona.
All in all, the far right takeover of Florida by the Trumplican Party has turned the entire state into a Trump and his puppets-led “banana republic,” one with restrictive voting favoring wealthy elites living in gated communities, police state tactics against protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, and sweetheart state contracts for GOP business cronies. How do you spell Batista? Simply, F-L-O-R-I-D-A.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina, cry for Florida instead.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
