Four candidates want Miami-Dade’s District 6 seat. Donald Trump has a favorite

The contest to elect a replacement for Rebeca Sosa in District 6 for the Miami-Dade County Commission has divided Republicans, with the incumbent commissioner and former President Donald Trump backing different candidates.

On May 6, Trump endorsed candidate Kevin Marino Cabrera for the officially nonpartisan District 6 seat, calling the lobbyist and political consultant who was Florida director for Trump’s 2020 campaign “a brave and smart America First conservative.”

Trump’s Cabrera statement came out the same day Coral Gables Commissioner Jorge Fors Jr., also a Republican, entered the race for the county seat with Sosa’s endorsement.

Nearly three months later, Cabrera and Fors dominate the fundraising totals for the four-person race.

The candidates for the Aug. 23 election are:

• Kevin Marino Cabrera, 31, lobbyist and public affairs consultant
• Dariel Fernandez, 43, elected member of Miami-Dade’s Republican Party Executive Committee
• Jorge Fors, 39, Coral Gables commissioner
• Victor Vazquez, 70, Miami Springs commissioner

Cabrera leads in fundraising, with more than $740,000 given to his campaign and Dade First political committee. Fors took in nearly $600,000 for his campaign and NextGen Florida Leadership committee, followed by Fernandez at $81,000 and Vazquez at $28,000.

District 6 stretches from the Hialeah area to the Snapper Creek Expressway, including all of Miami International Airport and the planned site for the David Beckham commercial complex and soccer stadium. Other cities in District 6 are Coral Gables, Miami Springs and West Miami, where Sosa served as mayor before winning her seat on the county commission in 2001.

She’s popular in the district, winning her last election by 50 points in August 2018. Trump dominated the 2020 presidential election in the district when he beat Joe Biden by 20 points.

Cabrera and Fors both have other high-profile endorsers behind them. The county’s police and fire unions back Fors, while the SEIU and AFSCME unions representing county employees and healthcare workers back Cabrera. Hialeah Mayor Esteban “Steve” Bovo sided with Cabrera, while Miami Springs Mayor Maria Puente Mitchell went with Fors.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is backing Vazquez, the only Democrat in the race. Fernandez received a mayoral endorsement outside of District 6 from Medley’s Roberto Martell.

Kevin Marino Cabrera

Cabrera’s connection to Trump stems from the 2020 presidential campaign, when Cabrera served as a paid director of the Trump reelection effort in Florida. Cabrera said he managed about 250 campaign workers and a $40 million budget.

Cabrera’s campaign hashtag #DadeFirst is a local adaption of Trump’s “America First” slogan.

His committee sent out a pair of mailers targeting voters of both major parties. The one labeled “Republican Voter Guide” compares Cabrera favorably to Fors, and includes the Trump endorsement. The nearly identical “Democratic Voter Guide” omits the endorsement from Trump and other Republican officeholders.

Cabrera was born in South Miami and is married to Demi Busatta Cabrera, a first-term Republican representative in the Florida House, representing District 114, which overlaps with parts of Miami-Dade’s District 6.

He had been a registered lobbyist in Miami-Dade County since 2018, earning $227,000 from the Mercury Public Affairs firm last year, according to his financial disclosure form. His total reported income was about $310,000 when adding in consulting work, rental income and other business ventures.

The county’s lobbyist database shows Cabrera ended all of his lobbyist registrations earlier this year, after briefly registering for two biometric companies in February, two months before filing for the District 6 race.

He’s running on a pledge to make county government more responsive to the average taxpayer. He cites his own frustrations securing county permits to replace a septic tank, and criticizes “do-nothing” officeholders. .

“I’m running for the County Commission because the politicians have failed us, and the system is broken,” Cabrera said in a campaign television ad. “The cost of living is out of control, yet politicians continue to do what they do best: nothing.”

In 2018, Cabrera joined a protest called by the Miami-Dade Republican Party outside an announced Coral Gables meeting with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and local Democrats running for Congress. Also in the protesting group: members of the Proud Boys, a far-right organization with Miami ties that later became implicated in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Video from the 2018 protest shows protesters surrounding an entrance, banging on the door, and demanding people inside let them in as the rowdiness grew. The event drew condemnations at the time from Republican leaders including U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who compared the scene to “tactics of left wing mobs.”

On his door-pounding display captured on video, Cabrera said he was exercising his right to protest and had no connection to Proud Boy members who were at the event.

“I am against any group that espouses any sort of hate,” Cabrera told the Miami Herald Editorial Board when asked about the Proud Boys. “I denounce anyone who espouses hate against anyone or discriminates.”

Dariel Fernandez

Fernandez finished first in the 2020 election for his District 34 seat on Miami-Dade’s Republican Party Executive Committee.

The committee serves as the governing board of the county’s Republican Party, and has been a source of friction in GOP leadership this year with news that several committee members also identify as members or former members of the Proud Boys organization.

Fernandez isn’t one of them, and in an interview noted the political parties are open to anyone who wants to join.

His campaign biography focuses on Fernandez’s involvement with nonpartisan organizations in Miami-Dade.

That includes Miami-Dade County’s Cryptocurrency Task Force. He was awarded “Man of the Year” in 2022 by the South Florida Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, where he’s listed as a member of the group’s honorary board.

He’s also president of the Somos Mas advocacy organization, which opposes the government of Cuba and campaigns for democracy on the island.

Born in Cuba, Fernandez started with a career in broadcast journalism, working at the Christian-themed radio station La Paz and later with a television show on Mega TV.

He is a married father of two. His wife, Carolina Vester, works as an assistant director in the Coral Gables Parks and Recreation Department. Fernandez owns a web-development and software company, Ponemus, and reported $118,000 in income from it last year.

Fernandez said he wants Miami-Dade to increase programs for seniors, encourage more construction of workforce housing, and not impose higher taxes on residents.

At a July 26 forum hosted by the Miami Foundation, he said he would push Miami-Dade’s transit agency to improve conditions for everyday riders forced to wait for their rides in the hot Miami summer.

“I think every bus stop in the county needs to have some sort of shelter,” he said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to wait for a bus in that kind of temperature?”

Jorge Fors

Fors won his seat on the Coral Gables commission in 2019, and now he’s giving it up to run for District 6 rather than seek reelection in 2023.

He’s emphasizing his experience in elected office. “You don’t have to guess what I’m going to do, or how I’m going to behave, in that position,” he said at the Miami Foundation forum.

Fors described his agenda as “Families First,” with an emphasis on county funding for police and services for both children and senior citizens. That includes expanding the county’s park system, with rules for new developments requiring public spaces.

Born in Miami, he’s married to Devyn Lopez and they have three children. He reported $531,000 in income last year, all from his Coral Gables law firm except for a $23,000 stipend from his Coral Gables commission seat.

Fors is airing ads featuring Sosa’s endorsement, and said Trump and national politics only “distract” from local issues.

A mailer from a political committee supporting Fors, Basic Principles, shows a picture of the candidate alongside a photo of Trump, saying he had joined the former president to reduce the price of gas and help the economy. Joe Gruters, Florida’s state GOP chairman, criticized the mailer for using Trump’s image to “confuse voters” in a race where the former president is backing another candidate. Fors said he wasn’t behind the mailer.

District 6 voters are receiving mailers with fake images of Fors in jail, and details of past legal troubles he calls minor.

The mailer cites more than two dozen traffic tickets; citations for underage drinking and possessing an open container of alcohol in Gainesville, where he attended the University of Florida as an undergraduate, and two tickets for parking in handicapped spots.

County records also show he paid about $16,000 in back taxes and penalties on a Little Havana condominium he bought in 2007 at age 22. He claimed a homestead exemption that is granted to primary residences, even though he said he began living with his parents in 2010 during law school at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens.

Fors blamed the problem on an oversight, though the county sends notices each year notifying homestead recipients of the rules. As first reported in the Political Cortadito blog, he paid the penalties in early 2019 as he prepared to run for his Coral Gables seat.

The anti-Fors mailer includes a fake image of his face superimposed on an inmate’s body, in cuffs and behind bars. The mailer came from a Tampa-based political committee, Save Our Quality of Life. Fors blames the attacks on Cabrera and his allies.

“This is not the first, nor will it be the last time, that a candidate uses Tallahassee dark money groups and shadow PACs to spread disinformation in Miami-Dade County,” Fors said in a statement.

Cabrera noted the mailer wasn’t from his committee but said voters should know about a candidate’s legal history.

Victor Vazquez

When he first entered the District 6 race in May, Vazquez said he ordinarily wouldn’t expect his status as a Democrat running against Republicans to matter in a nonpartisan local race. But Trump’s role in the District 6 contest has him rethinking what party affiliation might mean to voters.

“I never talked about party affiliations with residents unless they asked me. I talked about the bread-and-butter issues that affected them,” said the first-term member of the Miami Springs council. “Having said that, one of the [District 6] candidates immediately got an endorsement from Donald Trump. That brings a whole different light to things.”

Democratic Party leaders have issued statements supporting Vazquez, and he’s scheduled to participate in an Aug. 5 event put on by a Miami-Dade group of Cuban-American Democrats.

A retired history professor at Miami Dade College, Vazquez was 19 and in the Air Force in Vietnam when he was injured in an accident during a football game on base, which led to the amputation of his left leg.

Born in New York City, he’s a married father of seven and grandfather of six. He reported income of about $91,000 last year in retirement and veteran benefits, plus a $6,000 stipend from Miami Springs. His wife, Mayra Hernandez, works as an adjunct faculty member at Miami Dade College.

Vazquez wants Miami-Dade leaders to focus on long-term solutions the county can pursue. He cited affordable housing for senior citizens as one example.

There are “elderly folks who don’t want to maintain a house, but they want to stay in their neighborhood,” he said. “We don’t seem to have a vision countywide to try and solve that problem.”

Monika Leal, the Miami Herald’s director of Information Services, contributed to this report.

This story was originally published August 2, 2022 at 5:05 PM.