It’s not a person to person link like that of Obama to Ayers, but it is certainly true that McCain has pals who have been palling around with terrorists, and in fact giving them active support. Pals like Joe Lieberman and key members of the Florida Republican delegation. And these terrorists are far more lethal than the Weather Underground ever came close to being.
While the Cuban-American community has undergone dramatic changes—with the majority now supporting dialogue with Cuba and an end to restrictions on travel and remittances—hard-liners still control the major levers of power in Miami. Such is their clout in turning out reliable voters that McCain dropped his stance of 2000, when he said he would support normalizing relations with Cuba even under Fidel Castro. (“I’d be willing to do the same thing we did with—with Vietnam.”) McCain has allied his campaign with the Cuban Liberty Council, an uncompromising anti-Castro group that has all but dictated policy to George W. Bush. Two of the council’s most prominent members, media personality Ninoska Perez-Castellon and her husband, Roberto Martin Perez, have been among McCain’s most dedicated campaigners and champions in Miami.
As a result, McCain’s campaign and advisers find themselves allied with and/or supporting militants who have committed acts that any reasonable observer would define as terrorism.
El Exilio has made South Florida politics a really wierd place, and sometimes the comparison of Miami to a banana republic is made, and made aptly. Castro took control of Cuba three months before I was born, but many exiles remain as militantly against him as they were then, even if Castro is their uncle.
In September, McCain announced he was choosing Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican congressman from Miami, as his senior adviser and spokesman on Latin America. Rep. Diaz-Balart is a fierce hard-liner on Cuba, advocating, at various times, a blockade of the island, even military action if needed, to unseat Fidel Castro (his former uncle, once married to Diaz-Balart’s aunt). He, too, has been a supporter of certain kinds of terrorists who have struck on American soil. Since 2000, Diaz-Balart and his colleague Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have lobbied for and helped win the release of several convicted exile terrorists from U.S. prisons. Among the most notorious were Omega 7 members Jose Dionisio Suarez Esquivel and Virgilio Paz Romero, both convicted for their roles in the 1976 assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt with a car bomb in Washington, D.C. According to four agents I interviewed, the FBI also suspects the pair were involved in other bombings and attacks. (Suarez is known by the nickname “Charco de Sangre”—Pool of Blood.)
Diaz-Balart also pushed for the release of Valentin Hernandez, who gunned down Miami resident and Cuban émigré Luciano Nieves in February 1975 for speaking out in support of a dialogue with Cuba. Nieves was ambushed by Hernandez in a hospital parking lot in Miami after visiting his 11-year-old son. Hernandez also went on to kill a former president of the Bay of Pigs Association in an internecine feud. Hernandez was captured in Puerto Rico in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison. Today, Hernandez is living freely in Florida.
Nor has McCain’s senior adviser Diaz-Balart ever wavered in seeking “due process” for legendary bombers and would-be Castro assassins Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. Both were charged with the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing all 73 civilian passengers—the first act of airline terrorism in the Americas. In 2005, when I asked him about those who died—many of them teenage athletes—Bosch responded, “We were at war with Castro, and in war, everything is valid.”
(Lincoln’s brother Mario is also a member of Congress, representing another area of Miami-Dade County, so Castro actually has two nephews who are important players in the GOP.)
I know from threads on other blogs that non Floridians sometimes fail to grasp how close to the borderline of actual violence political life in South Florida can come, and how it has more than once crossed into physical violence. It’s only in the last few years, as the original exiles began to die off, and their children, often born here, or at least brought to the US at an early age, moderate the vehemence (but not universally, as can be seen from the Diaz Balart brothers), and the later waves of Cuban exiles, more interested in directly helping their families and friends still on the island than in a fundamental regime change, from the Marielitos on, began to gain political clout, that Miami politics has begun to return to the US norm.
Tags: Cuban American politics, McCain, politics
