The made for Miami fairy tale of Marco the good vs. Cabello the bad

It’s hard to comprehend how people still believe Marco Rubio, or swallow the manufactured PR stunts that the press fall for that paint a picture of the U.S. senator from West Miami as the hero of some tall tale.

A closer and more detailed look of Rubio would show a Little Marco that is more fairy tale character than the responsible politician he pretends to be. Which goes to show how gullible Miami and so many American voters are — a nice way of saying that too many of us are just plain stupid when voting.

If you follow the politics of Miami you’ve probably read or heard that Diosdado Cabello, a former Venezuelan vice president and head of parliament, and also a close ally of deceased leader Hugo Chavez, has put a hit on Senator Rubio. That’s right, the Miami Herald’s Patricia Mazzei has reported that there’s an order to kill Rubio “according to intelligence obtained by the U.S. last month.” And behind the order is Cabello, who is turning out to be Little Marco’s Professor Moriarty in this made in Miami tale of intrigue.

Mazzei writes that “federal authorities couldn’t be sure at the time if the uncorroborated threat was real…” What’s made it authentic, though, according to the Herald, is that “Rubio has been guarded by a security detail for several weeks in both Washington and Miami.”

I guess I’ve lived in Miami way too long and seen too much to believe this one. And I may not be the only disbeliever. Notice that the national and international press has shown little interest in this. Sure, a very few have, but they’ve used the Mazzei story as the source. Studied closely, it’s a story with NO legs. Believe me, if there was truth to the matter of a U.S. senator with a price on his head, the press would be all over it.

And if it’s a security detail that is proof of the threat… Oh please! A few months back Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez traveled to Paris, France, supposedly on county business, and took a security detail with him — claiming the threat of international terrorism. Thousands of taxpayer dollars were spent so that Carlos and wife could enjoy the European countryside, I suppose, without having to worry about an attack from ISIS.

Or has the Herald forgotten the many times they have reported claims that most everything bad that happened in Miami had to do with nefarious evildoer and area nemesis Fidel Castro? I’ll never forget watching County Commissioner Javier Souto, for example, another of these crazy Cubans we seem to grow here, going off on tangents during commission meetings as other commissioners and the public rolled their eyes, explaining how Fidel, or one of his many spies, was the reason for almost everything gone wrong in south Florida.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But it’s true.

And while Souto spouted his nonsense, Miami was being ransacked by scoundrels who used his story and others like it to divert our attention from the real culprits who pilfer from our city.

There’s also the kooky professor from FIU who in the 1980s sprouted a story that mosquitoes with who knows what virus and trained by the Castro government (yes, trained!) had been sent to south Florida. Crazy, I know, but it’s also true. And it was covered by the Miami Herald back then.

So now we have Cabello, labeled the Pablo Escobar of the anti-Venezuelans, chasing our poor Little Marco in order to kill him. Sounds more like fodder for a cheap 8 p.m. telenovela. But it’s the stuff people here love and believe, or are forced to. These stories power our local politics to the point where non-believers are ostracized and labeled the bad guys. It is why so many keep their mouths shut and fail to participate — in order to survive in our fairy-tale metropolis.

The fact is that if it’s government-run drug dealing we want to highlight, we’ve seen it. The Reagan administration dealt drugs back in the 1980s in order to finance the contras in Nicaragua. If it’s government-sponsored assassination attempts we’re looking for, there’s a history of that too… right in our own backyard. There’s plenty of proof of the dozens of times the CIA, with the blessings of more than one president, tried to eliminate then Cuban leader Fidel Castro over the years.

I read Patricia Mazzei’s columns and blog. She seems a fine, young journalist. But she should look back at this city’s history and how the Herald has covered it. Over the years the Miami Herald has caused damage to our area reporting and giving credence to stories like the one Marco Rubio now wants us to believe. She should not allow herself to fall under the spell of Rubio and other Miami spinmeisters, who over the years have helped slow Miami’s development simply for personal gain, hatred and/or rancor. And used the Miami Herald as their PR machine.