You have to be devoid of a soul to attack, in a quest for political glory, immigrant children looking for safety in this troubled world — and to do so in a city like Miami, Florida’s Ellis Island.
Shame is too benign a word for this new racist low.
As if not enough dishonor — and division — has been sown by today’s unrecognizable Republican Party in Miami’s Cuban-American community, here comes Gov. Ron DeSantis to open another chapter.
In Miami to participate in a so-called immigration forum that was nothing but an opportunity for DeSantis to fear-monger and bash President Biden, the governor decided that the best way to pound his anti-immigrant stances was to obsequiously pander to Cuban Americans.
And he chose the most wicked way to go about it: appealing to the regrettable superiority complex — “Call us exiles, not immigrants” — and the arrogance of my people, whose privileged immigration status in this country, no matter how we have arrived, has been a source of conflict with other communities.
Evoking Pedro Pan exodus
Digging into criticism of Biden’s handling of asylum applicants at the Southern border, DeSantis evoked the painful exodus of 14,000 unaccompanied children from Cuba in the early 1960s as superior to that of Central American children fleeing horrific circumstances.
The Pedro Pan exodus, for starters, was not as “legal” as the governor depicted and had its own share of darkness.
It was a secret, back-channel operation arranged with CIA involvement through the Catholic Church, which secured visa waivers and housed the children in camps like Boys Town in South Dade or placed them with foster families throughout the United States, as was done with my godfather, sent to strangers in the Midwest.
“There’s a lot of bad analogies that get made in modern political discourse, but to equate what’s going on with the Southern border … with Operation Pedro Pan, quite frankly is disgusting,” DeSantis said. “It’s wrong. It is not close to the same thing. We had people that were coming because they were fleeing a Communist dictatorship that was persecuting them. Those are not illegal immigrants. These are people that were sanctioned by the U.S. government to come.”
Because youths fleeing the rape, killing and persecution in Central America — and in Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and elsewhere — are less worthy, governor?
Just make the abyss of division a little wider, why don’t you?
Just so that you and the party — cheaters changing old people’s party affiliations from Democrat to Republican and planting sham candidates to win elections — can pocket a few extra votes from the recently arrived and already converted by misinformation. Yes, newcomers also are buying into the Republican Party’s false narratives about Democrats being socialists and communists — and closing the door behind them to others.
I also saw pitiful human behavior during the not-legal Mariel exodus of 1980, the balsero exodus of 1994 and the intellectual flight of the post-Soviet world, when newcomers often overstayed visas and had to pass a political litmus test to be welcomed.
To a complex conversation comes empty-suit DeSantis, a policy grifter like Donald Trump, only packaged in preppy instead of gaudy gold.
DeSantis piled on distorted Cuban immigration history, which predates Fidel Castro and included economic immigrants, like the first to come from my family — and Sen. Marco Rubio’s parents, too, as much as he likes to distort that fact and call them exiles.
Like the rest of the Cuban-American community, every Pedro Pan has a unique story — and not all subscribe to the governor’s politics, despite what his propaganda machine wants Floridians to believe.
Cuban-American outrage at DeSantis
Many more Pedro Pans, among them pillars of this community, are voicing their outrage that the governor wants to eradicate shelters for immigrant children in Florida by refusing to renew their operating permits.
Shelters that are similar to those used for unaccompanied Cuban children. In fact, the Msgr. Bryan Walsh Children’s Village was the original “Boys Town” that housed Pedro Pan children, according to Catholic Charities.
“As Florida business leaders and former Pedro Pan unaccompanied migrant children airlifted from Cuba to the United States, we join the Most Reverend Archbishop Thomas Wenski in urging you to reverse the emergency order you imposed to block the issuance of renewals of state licenses for facilities, including those run by Catholic Charities, that care for and protect unaccompanied migrant children,” a coalition of Pedro Pan leaders wrote DeSantis, Senate President Wilton Simpson and House Speaker Chris Sprowls.
“We also urge you to oppose [SB 1808 and HB 1355] currently being considered by the Florida Legislature. These policies take our state, our economy and our communities backward,” added a roster of signatories that includes top names in business, law, and philanthropy.
I wanted to scream as DeSantis spoke from the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, a cultural project that was supposed to unite us, but that instead has been hijacked and turned into a political tool.
DeSantis is a carpetbagger from Ponte Vedra. He doesn’t know our history. No child fleeing danger deserves such political hostility.
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