Trump-Biden fight for White House plays out in Miami, starring Che Guevara and Goya | Opinion
A manipulative Donald Trump campaign ad.
A sappy Che Guevara poem.
Stir it in some overly salted Goya salsa from the White House, simmer — and you’ve got the perfect Miami political-season story.
This is why we choose to live here.
Politics are boring elsewhere in the nation by comparison.
This is Miami as “Casablanca” with a twist: The intrigue plays to a string of Caribbean and Latin American “isms”: castroism, chavism, and the imported labels of Socialism and Communism.
Here, when people want to shut down a political candidate, a political issue, or a conversation that isn’t going their way, all they have to do is catcall — “comunista!” — and it’s over.
Logic and reason disappear. Confusion is created. You start questioning your own thoughts.
Who’s the villain?
The room empties, or at least is silenced.
And that’s exactly what the Trump campaign tried to do — poorly — with a television ad that attempts to pull at exile heartstrings by starting with the iconic image of the Freedom Flights of the 1960s, then hyping, to appeal to cancel-culture backlash, a Goya Foods boycott that hasn’t gone anywhere, as usually happens with such calls.
Throw into the mix pictures that link in viewers’ minds progressive U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-Bronx, with the hated Guevara, and Biden with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, and target reached.
It’s 2020, and the battle for swing-state Florida and the Hispanic vote is on.
Red-baiting tactic
The entire purpose of the 30-second ad is to paint centrist Democrat Joe Biden as a leftist scoundrel, “too weak to defend us.” Biden is beating Trump by 15 points nationwide and by 6 points in Florida, according to recent polls.
But the ad’s red-baiting tactic backfired, at least momentarily, on Trump and the Cuban-American Republicans who support him, when the the ad narrator’s past as a supporter of the Cuban Revolution surfaced as soon as it was out.
The Trump ad unfolds with the sometimes melancholic, sometimes aggrieved voice of Cuban telenovela actress Susana Pérez. Democrats easily found on YouTube her recording of a poem fawning over the murderous Guevara.
“Che, you know it all, the recesses of the Sierra...the podium...the poet is you. “
Oops!
There’s also a 2018 video of a trip Pérez made to Cuba, which looks more like an infomercial promoting the kind of touristy travel to the island that Trump has banned. And there’s an interview Pérez gave in 2011 to the liberal online newspaper Havana Times after she left Cuba in 2008, citing no political reasons for leaving, only personal ones.
All that history usually gets you tar and feathered in the right-wing sectors of Miami that worship Trump.
And Biden’s supporters didn’t waste any time pointing out the obvious: Who is (or was, maybe or maybe not, in this case) the Socialist now?
Cuban-American actress, playwright and Biden supporter Carmen Pelaez explained the Democratic outrage best.
“The Democrats are not calling Republicans fascists in their ads — voiced-over by a Pinochet-era actor,” she tweeted. “This is about the hypocrisy of the SOCIALISTA attack [on Dems] — which the media should question — not ignore.”
From Guevara to Trump
Of course, putting Biden in the Socialist sack is pure nonsense. The former vice president is having a hard time trying to appeal to the left-of-center wing of the party.
Trump is the autocrat in this country. He is sending secret police to cities to beat up people like the Castro brothers did and the current government does in Cuba, and like Maduro, whose well-known paramilitary force has killed thousands in Venezuela.
Of course, unlike in Cuba, in this country, Pérez has the right to support whomever she wants — and the rest of us have the right to criticize her.
But consider this: If the narrator of a Biden campaign ad had Pérez’s history, the same Cubans in Miami supporting Pérez now would be furiously crying, “comunista!”
In the divided Cuban Miami that Trump world has exacerbated, however, professing support for Trump changes everything.
Pérez, 68, is a heroine of the right now, a testament to our ability to forgive when it’s politically convenient.
With the right mea culpa — she was deceived in Cuba, Pérez told el Nuevo Herald — she has turned around the sour notes of her loving-Che episode and is getting more accolades on social media than criticism for her support for Trump.
It’s not surprising.
After all, despite Trump’s anti-immigrant tirades and policies that work against not only Central Americans but Cubans like Pérez, too, Cuban immigrants who wouldn’t be here if a Trump-like figure had been in power when they fled the island — during Mariel, the balsero exodus, crossing the Rio Grande — also are supporting the president.
It goes against all common sense, but, hey, it’s Miami.
The evolution from supporting communism to supporting fascism is an interesting phenomenon our esteemed sociologists ought to tackle.
Political alliances may have changed, but the devotion to the caudillo is intact.
This story was originally published July 24, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
