Greetings from Florida’s gubernatorial campaign trail, Hialeah edition.
Joining us today, as Democrat Charlie Crist names his lieutenant governor in the “City of Progress,” is the ghost of Fidel Castro.
His youthful, bearded rebel face appears, along with the hammer and sickle, on a mobile electronic billboard — propped up by Republican supporters of Gov. Ron DeSantis outside of Hialeah Middle Community School, where the official announcement is being made.
This is where Karla Hernández-Mats has taught for a decade and where Crist has come to announce the charismatic leader of the Miami-Dade County teachers union as his running mate, affirming that the dismal state of education in Florida will be on the ballot.
The GOP responds with the only trick this elephant knows: insinuating that Crist’s pick is a Castro sympathizer — and so is he.
Hernández-Mats’ face is displayed on the billboard next to Castro’s, making an incendiary connection in a city packed with communism’s victims.
On cue, DeSantis’ “War Room” actors explode on Twitter with more comunista! allusions.
Never mind that they fall flat.
Castro notoriously disbanded unions, fertile grounds of dictatorship opposition. As for “freedom,” DeSantis’ idea is to impose his dogma on education, a parallel to how Castro militarized and turned Cuba’s education system into indoctrination camps.
I know.
Outside of Florida, no one watching the spectacle understands or cares. And, in Florida, there are more important issues to discuss.
But it’s remarkable that it took a nanosecond for Team DeSantis to raise from the dead the comandante, after word spread that Crist would reveal his Hialeah-raised, wild card choice in the largest Cuban city after Havana.
With the nomination of Florida’s 2010 Teacher of the Year, Crist catapults DeSantis’ controversial education policies and his questionable portrayal of teachers as less-than and, worse, “groomers,” to the top of the ballot.
If elected, Crist would have an education insider who embodies what we know the American Dream means in this part of the country.
Born here of Honduran immigrant parents, Hernández-Mats, 42, is the college-educated, high-achieving daughter of humble, hardworking parents who toiled in fields, learned a trade (dad, a carpenter; mom, a secretary) and made a good life for their family.
So Hialeah. So South Florida.
So hopeful; yet, at the same time, a risky choice in a state torn apart by extremist right-wing politics, made worse by the inability of the Democratic Party to articulate an alternative position to independents and disgusted GOP moderates.
But, when in doubt, throw Fidel into the mix to obfuscate.
Hernández-Mats — mother, middle-school special-education science teacher, community activist — hasn’t held public office, so there’s not much to find other than television interviews defending teachers and public education.
But, oh, she tweets — and like just about everyone else in South Florida — she did so the day Castro died in 2006. Nothing particularly remarkable — if you’re not running for office.
The teacher stated facts along with the trending hashtag.
“A political figure dies at 90. Most in Miami rejoice, many in Cuba mourn #FidelCastro.”
Gold for the DeSantis camp, which is now adding falsehoods her tweet never had.
All the predictable characters are staging this smear job, branding her a Marxist, a Communist, in social media accounts, their lies and exaggerations amplified through the right-wing propaganda machine of bloggers, meme-makers and an assortment of excitable outliers.
“Karla Marx,” the “DeSantis War Room” nicknamed her in a hashtag.
“Charlie Crist’s running mate previously said Cubans ‘mourn’ Fidel Castro’s death,” read a Fox News headline, as if they had actually discovered something.
Yes, news images out of Cuba following his death were mostly of Cubans mourning or eulogizing Castro — and Fox News knows it.
What no one on the right says is what Hernández-Mats told a Herald reporter: She took to the streets to celebrate the tyrant’s death with throngs of Cubans.
The tyrant has been long dead and buried — finally, as I said in my good-riddance column — but here we are at the onset of midterm elections, and already, Castro has been resurrected.
He’s the go-to ghost on both sides of the Florida Straits and each end of the political spectrum, fascism and communism.
Cuban strongman Miguel Díaz-Canel and his cadre constantly quote Castro to keep the ruse of his alleged heroics alive and throw shade on their own shortcomings.
In Miami-Dade, Republicans couldn’t possibly go an election cycle without throwing their Democratic opponents into a made-up pro-Castro pool. It’s so much easier than having to actually discuss issues, especially policy dooming our children to a lesser education and poorly preparing them for competitive college admissions, issues on which Hernández-Mats can campaign.
If it were not for Fidel, Republicans would have to explain, for example, why lawmakers who get a paycheck from the private education industry have siphoned billions of our tax dollars to their employers — with the blessing of DeSantis and his predecessor, Rick Scott.
They would have to address the teacher brain drain, their flight from the profession and Florida, disgusted with unsafe working conditions, low pay, long hours and ingratitude from the likes of DeSantis.
But Fidel Castro’s ghost serves them well.
