The mainstream media is all atwitter with Obama's recent speech in Miami. Florida holds 27 coveted electoral votes and is habitually described as "pivotal" election-wise. The most scintillating aspect of the visit for the media was the Democratic candidate's hosting by the once influential Cuban-American-National-Foundation (KC and the Sunshine Band once influenced music too).
To salivating Democrats and their media cronies this hosting means Obama is poised to pilfer a hefty chunk of traditionally Republican Cuban-American voters in this key state. If so, it may come at the expense of votes from the Democrats' equally traditionally faithful “Hispanics.”
After all his pandering to the marginal Cuban-Americans voters who hosted him last week it will be interesting to see how the Obama campaign camel will thread the Hispanic vote needle.
A little background:
Castro now craves his former subjects' money as an economic lifeline rivaling the one from Hugo Chavez. By some estimates, former subjects living in the U.S., via cash remittances and other spending while visiting their families who remain hostage in Cuba, were lavishing his regime with $1 billion annually (a figure approaching Red China's monetary infusion).
This preposterous state of affairs finally provoked the Bush administration' in 2004 to limit Cuban-American visits to Cuba (classified by the U.S. State Department as a state-sponsor of terrorism) to one visit every three years and their remittances to $300 a quarter.
This amount, by the way, comes to roughly five times the typical Cubans' salary. The Republican sponsors of the bill (Cuban-American themselves)recognize the heartbreaking quandary for those whose families are held hostage by Castro.
Sadly, negotiating with kidnappers is sometimes unavoidable, especially with murdering psychopaths. So the bill didn't prohibit remittances; it simply scaled them back to an amount which, as mentioned, allows for a Cubans' daily necessities.
A constant gripe among other Latin Americans who seek U.S. residency is the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act that allows Cubans to apply for U.S. political asylum and thus legal residency, and thus citizenship, much faster and more easily than the process for other huddled masses from Latin America.
The traditional distinction, of course, was that Cubans (who much preferred living in Cuba previously; indeed in 1958, more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S.) were now fleeing an U.S. enemy/totalitarian regime that prohibited them re-entry.
Their status upon reaching U.S. shores actually had little to do with so-called “political pandering to the powerful Cuban-exile lobby,” and everything to do with something called the Refugee Relief Act signed into law by President Eisenhower in August 1953 to assist Iron Curtain refugees.
This was before any Cuban refugees from communism had ever arrived in the U.S., much less served in Congress, much less formed obscenely wealthy and fiendishly clever lobbying cabals.
Came Castro's Stalinist regime in 1959 and the Florida straights became a barrier far deadlier than the Iron Curtain. Many more Cubans died trying to breach it than Germans attempting to breach the Berlin Wall. Essentially the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 simply codified the 1953 Refugee Relief Act for victims of tropical Stalinism.
"I don't presume to know everything that I need to know about Cuba,” smiled Obama to his Miami audience, “and I am here not just to talk but to listen.'' Well, I'd suggest he cup his hands behind those ample ears and listen well.
On the one hand, if Obama has his way, Cubans will be equal to all other “Hispanic” immigrants and residents in the U.S. by being bestowed the identical travel and remittance provisions to their homelands.
On the other hand, if Obama has his way, Cubans will be much more equal than other “Hispanics” by also retaining their traditional fast-track to citizenship historically bestowed upon blue-eyed Czech and East Germans who breached the Iron Curtain, but generally denied to filthy wetbacks and other greasers who slither in from dysfunctional nations to the south.
No “racist Republican” while “pandering” to Cuban-Americans has ever proposed anything so patently unfair and offensive as Obama's proposal. If you're a political refugee, then act like one, say Republicans. Don't turn around and unduly enrich the very regime you claim to detest and that sponsors terrorism.
Obama pledges to (some potentially Democratic) Cuban-American voters a veritable banquet of cake along with its eating, while the rest of the “Hispanic” rabble are allowed entry into the banquet hall only to clear the tables, wash the dishes, and mop the bathroom.
Nothing of the sort issued from John McCain on his Miami visits. Yet employing their usual logic, the mainstream media accuses Republicans of shamelessly “pandering to Cuban-American voters,” who have traditionally given them 80 percent of their votes. Just maybe this traditional Republican “pandering to Cuban-Americans” consists simply of more obviously sharing their anti-totalitarian convictions and typically middle-class social and economic concerns.
On his two recent visits to Miami John McCain's Cuban-American hosts were former freedom-fighters and political prisoners. While Obama was being hosted by Democrat-leaning Cuban-American yuppies in Miami last week (Spanish last names, but essentially the same “whole-foods” crowd who hosted and applauded him as he sneered at “gun-and religion-clinging” middle-American yokels in upscale San Francisco), McCain was introduced to another Cuban-American crowd by a Cuban freedom-fighter/refugee named Roberto Martin-Perez, who probably qualifies as the longest-suffering ex-political prisoner alive in the world today.
Roberto spent almost 30 years in Castro and Che's dungeons, courageously spurning this Ccmmunist captors every attempt to “rehabilitate” him, which would have alleviated his tortures and perhaps freed him.
"He's not a traditional politician," said a beaming Martin-Perez about his honored guest John McCain "He speaks from the heart. He has what all political prisoners have — a feeling for justice and freedom." Heaven knows Martin-Perez should know.
"Anything that I and my friends might have experienced is nothing ? nothing ? compared with what some of the men in this room went through" McCain told Roberto and the Cuban-American audience, who given their sniffles and ovations were clearly moved by the Republican candidate's graciousness.
Humberto Fontova is the author of "Exposing the Real Che Guevara." Visit www.hfontova.com.
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