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Miami Things

By Lázaro Fariñas

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann

The Cuban American extreme right in Miami is happy these days because they have had a few victories in the city. Of course, these are so decadent that in fact they are pyrrhic victories. The segment of Cuban society living here cannot tell a victory from a defeat. This is no news, just more of the same. As I have said before, these people have no sense of ridicule.

A few days ago, there was a vote in one of the cities of Miami-Dade County to elect its mayor. With majority support from Cuban voters, James Cason was elected.  This is the guy, ill-remembered by Cubans in the Island, the man who was appointed Chief of the US Interests Section in Havana with the main objective of orchestrating confrontations with the Revolutionary Government.

It is a well-known fact that Mr. Cason, rather than a career diplomat, was a professional provocateur. His appointment had, among other purposes, the aim of provoking the Cuban Government to expel him from the country and therefore create conditions for a confrontation between both governments which would lead to a severing of the existing fragile relations.  That was the mission that today’s mayor of Coral Gables had;  and it was precisely by those provocative actions in Havana that the gentleman won the support of the Cuban American right wingers.

Cason is like the proverbial elephant in the glass menagerie and, consequently, can bring nothing good to Coral Gables. After his failure in Havana, he was sent to Paraguay and managed to earn the hatred of the Paraguayans. He had to end up in Washington in the arms of Frank Calzon, a savvy Cuban American, who has lived selling the snake oil of human rights, travelling around the world, and grabbing hundreds of thousands US dollars from the American Government. The anti-diplomatic ambassador moved to South Florida and now represents the right wing voters in one of its cities. The Cuban millionaires who live there are joyful. Let’s see what happens when this backfires.

Also, a few days ago in triumphant march by road – he has been forbidden to travel by plane – entered the hero of Miami’s Calle Ocho, Luis Posada Carriles. He got a champion’s welcome: press conference in a law firm in the morning, a red carpet reception in a private club, dinner there, and half a page of photos in El Nuevo Herald. He thanked the American justice system that acquitted him and the Miami extreme right which provided the money to pay the lawyers.

The Posada Carriles case is peculiar. The people who support him say that he is innocent of the crimes he is accused of committing; that he had nothing to do with the in-flight explosion of the Cubana de Aviación aircraft; that he had nothing to do with the bombs placed in Cuba at the end of the 90′s; that he did not torture anyone when he was a commissar of the political police in Venezuela; that he did not lie when he said he had crossed the Mexican border to enter the US.

In conclusion, for these people, Posada is a sort of saint