Searching for Someone Who Doesn’t Love Obama In Florida
By NancyA on August 2, 2008 at 9:25 PM in Barack Obama, Cuba, Florida, Religion
In the past few weeks, there have been many polls taken, but none seemed to include the Cuban-American Community. The Cuban-American community is a community that lives in exile. Many members of the community have not seen Cuba in 30 years or more.
It seems it takes a Canadian reporter, Alan Abel, to go to Florida to talk to the community. He joined them in a banquet hall, in a Cuban Restaurant. He tells his story in an article, Cuban-Americans sticking by McCain. He sets the scene with descriptions of the meeting place and the number of people in the hall. Abel took a hand count of the number of McCain supporters vs. the number of Obama supporters, 50 for McCain and 2 for Obama.
Abel puts a name and a face on the patrons in the hall:
It is a reunion of a group that calls itself the Municipal Council of the City of Santiago de Cuba in Exile. Santiago is where Fidel and Raúl Castro and 160 other upstarts wearing stolen military uniforms began their revolution on el 26 de Julio, 1953. Almost all the insurgents were killed or captured as they attempted to overrun an army base at six o’clock in the morning. The Castro brothers escaped to the high sierra, only to be surrounded, arrested, tried, convicted, condemned to death, reprieved, imprisoned, pardoned, and freed by the same Cuban government they soon would overthrow.
He captures the conversations of the Cuban exiles in their own words. They talk about Raul (Castro). Here is what they said:
“Did you hear what Raúl said last night in Santiago?” an architect and contractor named José Gonzáles barks at me. The Cuban leader had chosen the scene of the rebels’ original assault for a major policy address and the annual festival of Socialism or Death.
“He said, ‘Compañeros, I have bad news for you – we all must sacrifice even more,’ ” Mr. Gonzáles reports. “Well, that is exactly the same thing that Obama says!
“The left only wants to bring you down,” Mr. Gonzáles announces. “Obama doesn’t want to make everybody rich. When he talks about ‘equality,’ he means that everybody should be equally poor, not equally up.”
Interesting that the Cuban Americans draw such a stark comparison between Obama and Castro. Obama says he will meet with Raul Castro, unconditionally, in a May 23, 2008 speech.
This group of exiles wasn’t finished with Obama yet. This is one man’s view on Obama’s hope:
“We don’t need that kind of change,” another man named Felipe Fontanills agrees. “Fidel Castro achieved that already!”
Abel captured more opinions on Obama from these exiles. Again they are very telling words.
Señor Fontanills, another successful Miami architect, is just getting started.
“Read Fidel Castro’s speeches!” he commands me. “He is a much better speaker than Obama. In Germany, Obama was talking about the ‘unity of the world.’ This idea that we’re all equal, it’s bull—t – you cannot accomplish that.
Senor Fontanills had this to say about Obama’s words in Germany, offering a bit of advice even.
“Only a religious leader should use those words, because we are all equal in the sight of God. But in every human society, there is a nucleus of leaders who move the society forward. The promise of equality is a false promise. It is manipulation of human opinion!”
Mr. Abel asked the people gathered in this hall why they liked McCain and not Obama. It seems our Cuban American friends have a strong opinion on the candidates.
“Why do you like John McCain?” I ask the Cubans.
“When you have two pieces of
s–t,” one of them replies, “you pick up the one that stinks the least.”
In essence they are picking the lesser of two evils. It made me a take pause, I wonder if Hillary was their true choice. But possibly not as one Cuban American woman had this to say:
“When you come over here, it’s like the other Cubans force you to be Republican,” she says. “It’s still because of Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs.”
That was el 17 de Abril, 1961 – the botched liberation of the island by four boatloads of anti-Castro fighters. The young president John F. Kennedy had denied the invaders American air support on the grounds of “plausible deniability.”
In the end the talk turned to Obama’s lack of qualifications. They listed them as “too inexperienced, weak and young”. On McCain, they grudgingly accept him as the only other choice.
They leave with a question. A question that many have been asking for sometime now.
“For such a large country, can these really be the only two men for president?” Mr. Gonzáles wonders.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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