Heartburn

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

Gushing with unrestrained ethnic pride, Miami Herald editorial page editor Myriam Marquez seemed to include all Cubans in celebrating the election of Republican Marco Rubio to the U.S. Senate (“Marco Rubio’s simple ways to win hearts,” Saturday November 6, 2010):

“The pride of the Cuban-American community crystallized for me with this text I received at 5:37 a.m. on Oct. 24 from a cubanita friend in Orlando: ‘On my way to the debate. Remember, people in Cuba can’t do this!’…My friend was driving to a U.S. Senate debate that Sunday dawn, and her candidate, of course, was Marco Rubio, the 39-year-old father of four from West Miami who started a long-shot campaign against a popular governor with a simple message: Let’s live within our means.”

It’s inaccurate, presumptuous, and insulting for Marquez (or anybody else) to assume that (“of course”) being a Cuban American is synonymous with support of or pride in Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio is as ruthless and opportunistic a politician as they come. A protégé of Jeb Bush — who is both more intelligent and more right wing than George W. — Rubio has never met a program for the poor and the vulnerable he didn’t want to cut or privatize. Nor has he ever encountered a tax break for the rich he couldn’t support.

Case in point, the Bush era tax cuts, set to expire at the end of the year. The Obama administration wants, as a matter of elementary fairness and sound economics, to maintain the tax cuts for individuals making less than $200,000 a year or couples making less than $250,000. For those making more, taxes will increase modestly, from 36 percent to just under 40 percent, and only on that portion of income above $200,000/$250,000. In the halcyon days of the 1950s and the GOP presidency of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the top tax bracket was more than twice the 40 percent the “socialist” Obama wants to impose. However you slice it, at 36 or 40 percent, the wealthy will continue to make out like bandits.

The reasons for the administration’s tax policy are simple and compelling. The Bush tax cuts, (along with other social and economic factors), have been a colossal bonanza for the very rich, and only them. As the New York Times globetrotting columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has written, in order to experience a banana republic, a rapacious plutocracy where the richest 1 percent gets 20 percent or more of the income, you used to have to travel to foreign and exotic locations. Now the banana republic is us. Today, the richest 1 percent of Americans gets 24 percent of income, up from under 9 percent in 1976. According to Kristof, “the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.” (New York Times, “Our Banana Republic, November 8, 2010).

Not only is conferring further riches on the already opulent morally repugnant, it is bad economic policy. In a recession like the very deep one we are experiencing now, where insufficient consumer demand generates unemployment which in turn further depresses demand in a vicious circle, you want to put money in the hands of people who will spend it right now. These are people in the middle class and below, not the rich. Put another way, giving tons of money to the rich is the most unfair and inefficient way of fighting recession.

That’s what Rubio and his GOP cohorts want. Marco Rubio, an exemplary representative of the party of the rich, wants to permanently continue the tax cut gravy train for the rich. Doing so will increase the budget deficit by $700 billion, however. How does that square with the “simple message” that Myriam Marquez touts as the idea that originally propelled the Rubio campaign: “Let’s live within our means.” The answer is simple: it doesn’t. The rules that apply to the rich are different. It is simply one more example of Republican hypocrisy. And, no, it doesn’t make my Cuban American heart and soul warmer and fuzzier if the hypocrisy comes from a Marco rather than a Newt.

But back to Marquez. Perhaps realizing that the attitude of a single friend, even a cubanita from Orlando, can hardly represent those of a whole community, Marquez resorts to a grandiose and sentimental assertion:

“On election night, Cuban exiles, from France to Argentina, felt a tug of the heart, even those of us who worry he’s too far to the right.”

Count me absent from that parade. Heartburn. Not in Paris or Buenos Aires, but right here in Miami, in the heart of Little Havana, that’s what I felt. Heartburn. The acid reflux was only augmented by the victory of Rubio’s partner in zealotry, David Rivera, to the U.S. House of Representatives. There they will join two other Cuban American Republican members of Congress and many others in the GOP in trying to annihilate what little that is progressive that this country has achieved in a century. This they call taking our country back.

As a bonus, Rubio and Rivera will join the four other Cuban American members of Congress (including two Democrats) in supporting a hard-line policy toward Cuba that is cruel, immoral, and has been repudiated by the whole world. (In the most recent UN General Assembly vote only Israel, which annually receives $3 billion in U.S. aid and unqualified U.S. support in the Security Council, voted with the United States.)

Rather than cause for warm feelings and celebration, these developments, not only the ascent of Rubio and Rivera, but also that of the whole Republican right wing, are simply tragic.

And just how does Marquez know there is a global feeling of joy among the entire Cuban diaspora at the victory of Marco Rubio, that darling of the Tea Party who was against Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant law before he was for it?

Here is her proof:

“In Paris, Cuban writer Zoe Valdes wrote, ‘Marco Rubio has a plus, he brings tragedy as a lesson; his wound, the wound of his parents, is his virtue.”’

There you have it. A (skewed) sample of two: Between the cubanita from Orlando and Zoe Valdes (one of the most bitter and vitriolic of Cuban exile public intellectuals, who has even condemned Guillermo Fariñas, the Cuban dissident who went on a months-long hunger strike to obtain freedom for prisoners in Cuban jails), Myriam Marquez has figured out how we all feel. Bravo!