Vote for Joe, dump Rivera

By Varela

No, the title of this article is not a campaign slogan or anything like it.

And I’m not proselytizing for Democrats or against Republicans. Don’t misunderstand me.

I’m simply tired of being taken advantage of in this country while my children, after I’ve paid taxes for 30 years, have no health plan in Florida.

I only want to reason with my readers. And to do so, we must be practical and honest.

Let’s forget for a moment that David Rivera tells lies. He doesn’t tell them because they’re to his advantage but because he’s sick. He’s a mythomaniac and that’s a mental defect.

Let’s also admit that anyone can have a violent day and sidestep the fact that David once created a traffic accident so the campaign flyers for his opponent couldn’t be distributed on time.

Let us leave in the “strictly personal” folder the fact that he slapped a woman – he did so in a fit of jealousy – and she slapped an injunction right back at him, though she later dropped it (any woman would drop it if she gets enough consolation money.)

See how I’m extending a hand to Rivera?

Let us concentrate solely on his political campaign against Joe García.

For example, Rivera doesn’t give a flying fig for our future because he doesn’t want us to have better health or a better treatment for our illnesses. He totally opposed Obama’s health plan.

García, however, is in agreement with that plan, so he wants us – me, my family and yours – to remain healthy and properly insured.

Rivera, because he represents major anti-Castro interests that want to strangle the Cuban government so they can buy the island from east to west, does not want us to come closer to our brothers and relatives in Cuba. And he sees the shipments of medicine, food and clothing (as well as travel to the island) as a form of perpetuating the Cuban government.

García vibrates in another philosophical plane because he seeks family reunification, the establishment of better ties (including cultural) between Cubans, and the need to form a new and more coherent policy toward Cuba, because the old policy hasn’t worked in half a century and has perpetuated old habits.

This is not something I read anywhere. This was told to me personally by García, because he was one of the politicians who – at the time of my incident with The Herald – tried to save my life by phoning police chief Timoney from Paris to ask him not to shoot me. (Timoney told him he’d just as soon shut the paper down for three days and deliver pizza to me.)

As for Rivera, with whom I’ve never talked but I’ve read everything he says and denies, he is a continuation (a bad one, at that) of Mario Diaz-Balart. And I say this not because Mario had a better agenda (it was the same one as Rivera’s) but because Mario is less cynical.

Once, when someone asked Diaz-Balart if he had received money from companies that did business with Cuba, he said they were campaign contributions that his finance manager – not he – handled. It was an evasion, not a lie.

Rivera would have answered that it was a rumor invented by Castro agents in Miami.

In sum, if we are so badly represented in Congress that we have more unemployed people than tourists; if the medical care for children and the elderly is so bad that we’re afraid to have children and age; and if our public education system is crumbling so fast that many students are opting for taking (and paying for) their courses on the Internet …

… if we want to change that, we cannot vote for more of the same. We must vote as logic dictates.

And the only change we Floridians are able to make next month is sending Joe Garcia to Congress.

That’s all.

For the first time in over 20 years, we can shake off an ultrarightist crud who only represents the powerful and couldn’t care less for the middle class.