Impostors

If you live in Miami, you’ve probably seen it with your own eyes.

Walk through downtown—off Flagler Street, near the almost billion-dollar, taxpayer-funded courthouse. You’ll find multi-million-dollar glass towers looming over people living in cardboard shelters on sidewalks and under overpasses, sleeping on tattered, dirty, discarded mattresses. This is the reality in the shadow of luxury.

Now, picture this: More than 335,000 children attend Miami-Dade public schools. One in every five of those kids lives in poverty. That means roughly 67,000 children here in Miami may miss one or more meals a day because their parents simply cannot afford food. Children. In the United States—the wealthiest country to ever exist.

Let’s talk affordability, the issue highlighted by New York City’s newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani. In Miami, half of all households—and 90% of renters earning under $50,000—struggle to afford housing. High rents, low wages, and a housing market tilted toward speculators and investors have pushed working families to the edge. Longtime residents and essential workers are being priced out of their own city.

And this is all happening while billionaires pour into the area, widening the already massive gulf between those who can and those who simply cannot.

Now consider our own elected officials—especially South Florida’s three Republican members of Congress who proudly identify as Cuban. What have they done to address any of this? Really think about it. Mario Díaz-Balart, Carlos Giménez, María Elvira Salazar. What concrete improvements have they brought back from Washington to benefit Miami?

Since they can’t answer that question, they turn to an old trick: distraction. In a recent press conference, instead of discussing housing, poverty, or the needs of their constituents, one of them attacked Mamdani’s victory in New York and compared him to Fidel Castro. They called him a Marxist. Rep. Giménez declared, “I recognize extremists when I see them,” as if that somehow explains Miami’s housing crisis.

But what do Fidel Castro or Marxism have to do with rent prices in Miami? With wages? With rising homelessness? With the 67,000 hungry schoolchildren?

Díaz-Balart has spent more than two decades naming streets after exiles while doing virtually nothing to improve life here. Giménez has made a career hopping from one taxpayer-funded paycheck to another—county, city, now Congress—while ranting about “communist takeovers.” María Elvira danced her way through 1990s Havana, and since her election to Congress, has returned with phony checks for her district (money she voted against), and still claims credit for funds she opposed.

Don’t be fooled. In Miami politics, communism and Fidel are the oldest sleight-of-hand routine in the book. They’re used to stir fear, win elections, and then—once in office—avoid doing the job. Meanwhile, money that should help real people is diverted, ignored, or squandered.

Say whatever you want about Mamdani. But he ran on issues that actually matter to New Yorkers—housing, affordability, safety, opportunity. Those same issues matter here. If he succeeds, you can bet our local politicians will dismiss him as a socialist rather than ask whether some of his solutions could help struggling cities like our own.

Making matters worse, even the Miami Herald’s MAGA-aligned editorial writer jumped on the scare-tactic bandwagon, declaring that a “democratic socialist” leading America’s largest city is “unthinkable.” Unthinkable? Or just inconvenient for people who don’t want to discuss how Republicans have failed their own constituents?

Look at what has happened under their watch:

– Nearly a billion dollars wasted building “Everglades Alcatraz,” causing lasting harm to our most essential water source, all to punish mostly Black and brown immigrants—people who, like earlier generations, came here to work and build a life.
– Support for a president who threw himself a multimillion-dollar Great Gatsby-themed party while Americans struggle.
– Applause for that same president as he bulldozed part of the White House to build a gilded ballroom—during a holiday season marked by a government shutdown that cost families paychecks.
– Approval when he allocated $40 billion of our money to an Argentine extremist—then claimed there wasn’t enough left for hungry families, lost food-assistance recipients, uninsured people, or public schools.
– Total silence about the $45 million gifted to FIFA—a fabulously wealthy organization—to host World Cup games here, simply because billionaires wanted the spectacle on their doorstep.
– No meaningful effort to address Miami’s soaring healthcare costs. In fact, many policies they back all but guarantee those costs will rise further.

So please: Stop blaming Mamdani. Stop blaming socialism. Stop using Castro’s ghost to distract from real, urgent problems that Miami’s leaders have ignored for decades.

As for Giménez and the other two pretenders: Do something for this community instead of hiding behind ideology, fearmongering, and ghosts from the past.