Feeling left out
Al’s
Loupe Read Spanish Version
Feeling
left out
Miami
Hispanic Democrat group wants to ‘advise’ Obama
By
Alvaro F. Fernandez
alfernandez@the-beach.net
Some
Hispanic democrats have taken the offensive with the Obama for
president campaign. Feeling left out of the Hispanic and Latin
American agenda, former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferre sent out a
confidential July 4 memo to 25 prominent South Florida Hispanics,
according to The
Miami Herald.
His
plan, create a policy advisory group from this area “to
counterbalance what he [Ferre] perceives as excessive
micro-management of state campaigns by Obama’s Chicago
headquarters.” The memo was issued just days after the naming of
Cuauhtemoc “Temo” Figueroa, a Mexican-American with strong ties
to labor, as head of the Obama national Hispanic vote getting effort.
Figueroa
was a top official with the American Federation of State County and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME). From 2001-02, he was in Florida to help
a democrat beat Governor Jeb Bush in the 2002 election. This
firebrand’s specialty is
getting out the vote not
setting the policy agenda. Temo left Florida in early 2002 before the
election for governor. By then AFSCME, and Temo was of the same
opinion, had decided there was no play in Florida. He was sent to
work in New Mexico. In November 2002, Bill Richardson captured the
governorship.
Figueroa
is not your wishy-washy Hispanic democrat we’ve come to know in
South Florida. This guy is progressive and dislikes republicans. He
bleeds blue. You will not see him in Armani suits. He is not the type
to mingle with the likes of the 25 in the proposed “advisory
group.”
Left
out?
“In
the inner circle of candidate Obama’s campaign there is no one who
has deep knowledge or shown interest in Latin America or Hispanics in
the United States,” wrote Ferre in his memo, according to the
Herald. The group’s worries include the fact that Obama is against
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the pending
free-trade deal with Colombia.
Ferre’s
Miami Hispanic group favors the aforementioned agreements. I have not
seen the names of the 25, but I would bet you I can name no less than
half the people on that list without giving it much thought. It is
one reason why I am delighted by the former mayor’s worries.
Although, I will add, there are probably a couple of persons on that
list who I respect tremendously. Ferre happens to be one of them.
Still,
among Ferre’s 25 (and I speculate here) are included some already
named to the Obama Florida team. Surely, the state’s Hispanic
director is not
from Miami: Frank Sanchez, who served in the Clinton White House. He
hails from Tampa. But included in the Obama team is Miamian and
former Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) Luis
Lauredo, a Miami-based former Democratic Party leader, who will join
a group of campaign spokesmen on Latin America, and Sergio Bendixen,
a South Florida pollster, who has also been enlisted by the campaign.
Who
should worry?
Another
name thrown into the Obama mix in the Herald report was former
Ambassador to Panama Simon Ferro, who once also served as Florida
Democratic Party chair. Lauredo and Ferro still are well-known
democrats who, in my opinion, at key moments let down the state and
its many democrats. Both are Cuban and learned to navigate political
waters here as democrats when the word “communist” was used to
hurt. During their
years of influence, democrats saw a downturn in Party influence and
results as they danced to a Miami-only Demoblican beat.
Interestingly, on a personal level both managed to prosper
tremendously during these down times for democrats.
Ferro,
back then, was the Cuban American National Foundation lawyer while
Jorge Mas Canosa was alive. He then became ambassador to Panama
during the Mireya Moscoso presidency. There is documentation of Ferro
intervening on behalf of Luis Posada Carriles and friends before
their pardons by the Panamanian president.
Finally,
I would ask most on the list of 25 where they were in 2000, for
example? A year when in Miami, among Cubans, you could not bring up
the name Gore for his ties to Clinton and the Elian saga. Remember?
At the time we had a Cuban-American mayor, a democrat probably on the
Ferre list, who went on vacation right before the election. Where was
he?
No,
no. The ones worried should be the Obama campaign. I believe the list
of 25 sees a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. It’s a good
time to be a democrat. If I was advising the campaign, I’d tell
them to string them along. Take their money. But no way would I
include them in my innermost loop. Obama cannot hope for change in
Latin America a la Miami.
