Police investigating defacing of headquarters for Miami group with close ties to Havana
The Miami-based headquarters of the Alianza Martiana group, whose members have close ties to the Cuban government, was vandalized early Monday morning, according to Miami Police and Max Lesnik, president of the group.
“They painted various things in the front of our offices,” Lesnik said in Spanish. “They also defaced the Alianza Martiana sign. There is a video in the hands of the police where four individuals are seen, one of them dressed as a painter, who committed this act.”
According to the police report, vandals defaced the facade of Alianza Martiana at 3011 NW 7th St. by painting “Down with communists” messages in Spanish and other unintelligible scribbles, Univision 23 reported.
The graffiti appeared shortly after a meeting in the building in favor of travel to Cuba. At that meeting, captured on video, Lesnik said that José Martí’s legacy was the Cuban Revolution, a comment many exiles find offensive.
“This reminds me of the times I worked in the magazine Réplica, where they started painting the walls and ended up planting eleven bombs,” Lesnik said. “We thought that time in Miami had already been overcome.”
According to Lesnik, who works for Radio Miami, an online radio site critical of the hard-line Cuban exile community in South Florida, several activists gathered on Sunday to protest against the suspension of travel to Cuba. The tightened travel restrictions were recently imposed by the Trump administration to pressure the Cuban government to abandon its ally and benefactor, the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela.
“Traveling to the homeland is a human right that unites the Cuban family,” said Lesnik, who has a long history of stirring controversy in South Florida by defending the government established by Fidel Castro in 1959.
In 2016, several videos that went viral on social media show Lesnik and activist Edmundo García paying homage to communism and the late Cuban ruler during one of the Alianza Martiana meetings. Lesnik was a Castro friend and for decades raised his voice in defense of the island’s government even as others condemned the executions and ouster of political opponents as well as property confiscations carried out by the Castro regime.
This story was originally published January 27, 2020 at 6:54 PM.
