Conexión Miami / Raonel and gold fever
It is said that Cuban Raonel Valdez Valhuerdis has a reputation as a swindler, trafficker in human beings and mafioso. That’s all, so far. Raonel could be just another delinquent, someone with a propensity to disrespect the laws or interpret them as he sees fit.
It is also said that Raonel is a gold thief, not a thief of gold chains or bracelets, a swiper of rings trained in Obispo, but a Florida-trained thief, à la Ocean’s Twelve, following in the steps of the Spaniards who plundered the gold of the American natives.
Although Raonel denies it, claiming that “I stole nothing, there’s no proof,” he is accused of the theft of more than 100 pounds of gold in Coral Gables on Oct. 12, 2012, the same day that — what an irony of history — Columbus stepped on the soil of the “New Continent” 520 years earlier.
Through one of those strokes of luck that justice is blessed with, Raonel was found hiding in the bushes while waiting to flee to Mexico from Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize. On Wednesday, shortly after 5 p.m., he was taken into Miami-Dade County Jail.
A campaign against predators and pimps
The Diario las Américas on Monday published something that State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle had warned about: “The 235 criminal cases that my prosecutors have filed against those criminals who act as if our children were their ATMs” — referring to child-prostitution pimps — “have had a major impact, but we can do more and should do more.”
The State Attorney’s Office this week launched a public-awareness campaign to try to put an end to the sexual exploitation of minors in Miami-Dade County.
What is the sex trafficking of minors? How to detect it? Those are questions the campaign seeks to answer. Supported by the authorities and by the owners of some private businesses, the MDSAO plans to erect public-service billboards in various places in the county. A telephone hotline (305-350-5567) will be activated for people to phone in reports of suspected child prostitution.
‘I am’
Republican senator Marco Rubio, as Cuban-American as the rapper Pitbull, dreams about being President of the United States. Asked by ABC-TV this week if he was ready to run for that office, Rubio said yes, he was ready, but that he’d wait until later this year to decide whether to run.
Whatever the 43-year-old senator decides, he has already asked Hillary Clinton — perhaps the strongest Democratic candidate — to account for her “failures” as a Secretary of State. Rubio’s rhetorical statement of what a president should be like: “A president has to have a clear vision of where the country needs to go and clear ideas about how to get it there, and I think we’re very blessed in our party to have a number of people that fit that criteria.”
Second case of MERS reported in U.S.
After a case of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) was detected in Indiana, health authorities in Florida confirmed another case of the virus, which has affected hundreds of people in the Middle East.
As its clinical name indicates, MERS is a disease that causes coughing, shortness of breath, pneumonia and even death. The Florida Health Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this Monday held a press conference on the serious effects of this virus, which, according to Telemundo51.com has taken the lives for one third of the people it has struck.
New record for Aroldis Chapman
During a spring training game on March 19, the Kansas City Royals’ Salvador Pérez connected a line drive to center. The commentators of Royals-TV described differently what they saw. One said: “A line drive hits Chapman in the face and Chapman has gone down.” The other — maybe the more sensitive though less professional broadcaster — blurted out, “Oh, my God, oh, oh, boy, oh, my God!”
The aftermath is by now well known. Aroldis Chapman, the Cuban pitcher with the Major Leagues’ fastest toss (106.9 miles per hour) ended up being fitted with a metal plate in his forehead. None of this is news, you know better than me; the news is that Chapman returned to the diamond this Sunday for his team the Cincinnati Reds, fanned three Colorado Rockies — the Rockies lead in batting with .302 — and picked up his first save of the year.
