Cubans are ‘welcome,’ this South Florida mayor said before attacking Biden for their arrival | Opinion
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“They’re welcome. Nobody is trying to kick them out.”
That’s what Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo Jr. said last week during a video interview with Miami Herald/el Nuevo Herald journalists about the new surge of Cuban migrants in his city.
He called it “concerning that we don’t know how many.”
After enumerating the telltale signs of a wave, Bovo added that the federal government “should be advised and understand what an impact like that does to a city like Hialeah. How do we handle it?”
Good question, and a starting point for an elected official to begin problem-solving.
Bovo sounded like he was making the case for federal resettlement assistance and resources. Bravo, I thought. That’s what a mayor and city council should do: raise awareness and advocate for his city — and treat people fleeing oppression and dire poverty with respect.
Especially in Hialeah, said to be the second-largest Cuban city after Havana.
But, by Tuesday, Bovo’s message on the topic had turned highly political and, specifically, anti-President Biden.
The mayor — elected to a non-partisan seat, though he is a Republican — co-sponsored a resolution, passed by the council, chastising the Biden administration for “open border policies” for the tens of thousands of Cubans he claims are overrunning the city, the same ones he welcomed, and demanding that the federal government stem the flow from the southern border.
Got the GOP memo
He apparently got the Republican Party memo that its members aren’t supposed to welcome asylum seekers in this country — and that, like the majority-Republican House, Republican mayors don’t solve immigration problems before the November election.
Ex-President Trump needs chaos at the border and in cities like Hialeah so that fearful voters will choose a vulgar law-breaker who tried to overturn a presidential election over an older but decent incumbent being obstructed at every turn, who still passed effective legislation helping curb inflation.
How could Bovo, in a rare moment of independent leadership, forget that his idol Trump has a street named after him in Hialeah?
Better to create a political circus than to work with the federal government, for example, to accurately assess impact and extent of the influx through Department of Children and Families records on how many newcomer aid recipients are in Hialeah ZIP codes.
Better to bash Biden than to tell U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, whose district includes Hialeah, or Sen. Marco Rubio, who represents the whole state, to push their party to pass immigration and border security measures instead of obstructing them.
Better to point the finger at Washington than to risk the wrath of Hialeah voters by calling for the end of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which enables the privilege of being able to speedily become American residents and citizens.
Better even, as preposterous as it is, to blame Biden for the Cuban exodus rather than Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel. How low can we go helping Trump?
Nothing new for Hialeah
This wave of arrivals is hardly Hialeah’s first rodeo handling an influx of Cuban refugees.
When I covered the city in 1980, during the height of the Mariel boatlift that brought 125,000 Cubans to South Florida in five months, the vacancy rate was zero. Homes and apartments, not as many as there are now, were bursting with too many relatives being housed.
The housing shortage was so bad that the newly-hired chief financial officer had quietly started sleeping in City Hall. He would pretend to leave with everyone else, I discovered, but return at night. He kept his luggage and toiletries in his office closet.
Refugees also took over city parks, where they were housed as they awaited resettlement.
Hialeah’s non-Hispanic residents were incensed and tempers often flared that year at city council meetings, where one side of the audience waved small American flags and the other side Cuban ones.
Political battles ensued over whether city documents could be translated into Spanish — and even a Cuban’s mango tree turned into the subject of a legal brawl with an “Anglo” neighbor.
“Will the last American to leave Hialeah, bring the flag?” became the bumper sticker and rallying cry.
READ MORE: How a migrant influx is causing tensions in one of the most Hispanic cities in the U.S.
Indeed, there was white flight, along with a building boom. The housing shortage ended as properties went up for sale. Immigration and population shifts led to the forever Cubanization of Hialeah, Miami-Dade County’s second-largest city.
As for the American flag, Cubans were more than happy to fly it. At one point, the rows of American flags fluttering along Palm Avenue’s used-car dealerships in Hialeah seemed to be the largest concentration in the county.
It’s an immigration cycle on rinse and repeat in Miami, with the 35,000 who came during the rafter exodus of the summer of 1994, the flight of intellectuals and artists of the 2000s, and the first big crowds at the border during the Obama years.
Every Hialeah’ council member and the mayor can trace their beginning to a Cuban exodus.
And now, for the sake of politics, here are the descendants grandstanding, instead of helping, using the latest wave of fellow Cubans for political purposes.
