Charlie Crist will go to Cuba
MIAMI – When former Governor Charlie Crist visited Big Sugar billionaire Alfie Fanjul (“Cuba: here comes Miami, ready or not!), we knew it was more than a courtesy call.
Our crystal ball is clear when it comes to Cuba, the Fanjuls and Charlie Crist. On a first visit to Havana two years ago, we commented on a Fanjul sighting.
If Charlie goes to Cuba, he will have accomplished a singular feat: a political life after angering the Fanjuls.
In 2008, then Governor Crist announced a deal to buy more than 130,000 acres of lands belonging to US Sugar, the Fanjul’s cartel competitor. The billionaire Fanjuls were apoplectic. They had been kept out of the deal.
The notion that a politician independently could breach their lockdown of land use on some 700,000 acres formerly called the Everglades — sugar is the most potent source of campaign contributions in the state — was more than they could bear. The reasons are complex but mostly factor from Big Sugar’s determination to extract every last cent from the soil of their exhausted lands south of Lake Okeechobee.
The Crist plan would do something intolerable: open a path where the Fanjuls had successfully blocked environmentalists.
In response to Charlie’s chutzpah the Fanjuls rallied millions of dollars and other big donors to support Crist’s opponent for U.S. Senate, Marco Rubio. Yes, that Marco Rubio, climate change denier. (Marco owes his political life to Big Sugar.)
By 2012, the Fanfuls’ European and Brazilian competitors had been laying tracks for major investment in Cuba. In other words, the Fanfuls were falling behind.
It made sense for the top dogs in Miami to continue to support Lincoln, Ileana, and the hard-line anti-Castro voices while behind the stage, they send out feelers to the elite in Havana. Everyone in the baggage checking line at MIA is doing it: hating Castro and sending millions of dollars to Havana.
Charlie Crist met Alfie Fanjul, and the two see eye-to-eye despite past differences. On both sides of the Florida Straits, the embargo props up Potemkin villages. Why wouldn’t Charlie Crist go to Cuba?
Here is a good reason he will. At a recent fundraiser for Crist on Normandy Isle just north of Miami Beach, Crist raised more than $400,000. The room was packed with donors: Hispanic Republicans ready to make money in Cuba.
For the past 20 years Alan Farago has written, worked and volunteered to advance civic engagement and issues related to the environment and politics. He publishes the Eye on Miami blog and writes under the name, Gimleteye.
(From Eye on Miami)
