David Kent & Super Rivera

By Varela

David Rivera is a Florida superhero. He doesn’t spend as much in haircuts as his friend Marco Rubio, but he gets into adventures that cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars and the ultrarightists applaud him anyway. That’s why he appears in the weekend funnies.

He engaged in a crusade against the travel agencies to Cuba that would have been cheaper if he had taken the air out of the airplanes’ tires or poured sand into the fuel tanks. Of course, if he had been caught doing it he would have gone to jail, but he deserves to be behind bars anyway, for the excessive outlays he imposes on the taxpayer.

A week ago, the state of Florida had to reimburse the travel agencies to Cuba more than 360 thou for the legal costs of Rivera’s sprint up and down courthouse corridors, stumbling into judges, lawyers and prosecutors.

Rivera assumes that Florida is a state apart, a kind of banana republic where he can do as he pleases. He tries to adopt, in the state of Florida, foreign policies different from the United States’ that can provoke diplomatic upsets, traumas and neuralgia and inflict damage to regional commerce. But he is Super Rivera.

In other words, David wants to attack Cuba economically because he can’t do it militarily. He lacks a personal army and the folks at Vigilia Mambisa are too old to do anything worse than smash musical CDs. To wage his war, David takes from the funds for the children’s education and the hospitals for the sick.

Rivera’s obsession, foolishness or fantasy against the flights to Cuba – which he calls unconstitutional, landings on an enemy nation, and transportation for Caribbean terrorists – has already cost very dearly to the community’s plans to create in Florida an alienated state of the Union.

Some judges want to throw Kryptonite at him, because they say that superlegislators like David Rivera are out of control, they want to fly too high. Governor Charlie Crist himself has had to veto dozens of his special projects, which drain part of the state’s $70 billion budget, a figure higher than the economy of any Central American country.

Many of those “projects” affect us directly because they involve Miami-Dade County, Super Rivera’s “Metropolis.” They include:

• one million bucks for Florida International University’s Democratic Conference (maybe for courses to prevent acts of repudiation to Cuban artists who appear in Miami);
• half a million for Exponica International, a trade show (maybe to teach businessmen how to deal with China but not with Cuba);
• another half-million for the Latin Chamber of Commerce (will it bankroll fund-raisers for Marco Rubio’s campaign?);
• 200 thousand for Urban Advantage of Miami-Dade (the name suggests that the money will create parks, basketball courts and baseball fields in the inner cities);
• 32.5 million for a health-care building in the middle of the FIU campus (will it enable the old folks to run or play golf?). This healthy budget includes 17 million for a domino hall, gymnasium and knitting classes (dominoes and knitting needles are for the elderly, but a cardio-gym is something macabre.)

That is why Crist, who’s a Doubting Thomas like me, has proposed eliminating such projects from the Miami-Dade budget. But what’s ironic is David Rivera’s cynicism when he states that “We don’t play with other people’s money and don’t spend dollars we don’t have.”

Of course not, Rivera plays with those who have money and wastes the dollars that others (the taxpayers) have.

Born in Cuba in 1955, José Varela was an editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years at the magazine Éxito (1991-97) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). A publicist and television writer, he is a member of the Progreso Semanal team.