Romney Does Florida - Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/17/romney-does-florida/


good overview of Miami politics and the embargo

excerpt:

Two factors are in play, in the “post-ideology” Miami. First, demographics. Younger Cuban Americans are eager to help family left behind in Cuba and view the Miami-Dade political ladder with cynicism. It carries over to indifference and even animosity toward the embargo. The second is economics. The housing crash severely hobbled suburban sprawl in west Dade. Many of the principal actors — like Pino — have been pinned down by debt. The housing crash collapsed Miami businesses based on sprawl. Pino founded US Century Bank to compliment his production home building juggernaut, US Century Homes. The bank, during the boom boom years, grew quickly to over a billion dollars in deposits and a reputation as the insider piggy-bank, but now hobbles along — its Tier One Capital supported by the largest contribution of federal TARP money in the state of Florida.

In Miami New Times, the owner of Palacios de los Jugos Reinaldo Bermudez, who served three years in federal prison, observed, “Here in Miami there are a lot of people with money who have had problems with the law… Thankfully, we all have the opportunity in this country to re-enter society when we’ve done something wrong.”

But there are also a few people who organized vast economic wealth around local political levers that operated according to hatred of Castro which wasn’t illegal in the slightest. It is supported by US foreign policy. They, too, are looking for a way back in the game and in the way that agnostic application of politics most benefits: dropping the embargo against Cuba. There is no money to be made building suburbs in Miami. Havana? Not yet.

There are external factors at work. The collapse of real estate and banking in Spain has had an important effect on local Miami deal makers who successfully exported their business models to Spain, where US-style ghost suburbs now litter the landscape. There has been very little examination of this phenomenon through which a compelling argument can now be made, by Republicans, that lifting the embargo is needed to revive fortunes that were lost in the crash.

Who, exactly, gets to “control” access to Cuba from Miami is the question.

So long as the Cuban American developers were printing money by rezoning farmland to sprawl, the embargo served the purpose to organize Miami and Florida politics to their bidding. Now that sprawl is dead in the dust, the rationale for opposing trade with Cuba has vanished. It requires some leadership in the Cuban American community to reorganize the story line, in order to drop the embargo. The Romney agreement to deploy Marco Rubio, a surrogate for Jeb Bush, to deliver his introduction at the upcoming Republican National Convention applies. Rubio in the spotlight focuses on the electoral value of Florida. But that ignores the backstory. Behind the scenes, it sets the stage for a reversal of the embargo in a way that advantages the GOP if Romney wins.


more at link .... I was wondering why Yoani Sanchez was musing about which party would be better for Cuba