At the time the primaries started, Bernie Sanders seemed to have a good chance of getting the Democratic nomination. He had won in New York and California, and in Florida he was definitely in the fight. He had just come out from winning in Iowa while his biggest opponent, Joe Biden, seemed to be unable to take off. But the Sanders debacle began on CBS’s “60 Minutes”, when on that program, on Sunday, February 24, he made a comment about the Cuban revolution along the lines of “it would be unfair to say that everything is bad.” That sentence was enough for the propaganda machine of President Trump’s campaign to magnify it and accuse him of being pro-communist.
The Latin world of the East Coast immediately echoed the approach. The attacks multiplied and Sanders went from being a Swedish socialist to a Cuban communist.
Many other things happened that tipped the scales towards pre-candidate Biden, even though he did not have enough money, and his campaign took off like a rocket. He beat Sanders by 30 and 40 points in later primaries and won the Democratic nomination. It was a sad end to Sanders, who lost to Biden by a much larger margin than he had previously lost to Hillary. There was no one in his entire team wise enough to advise him not to touch the Cuba theme, since that theme has been known to destroy personalities and bring political campaigns to an abrupt end.
Florida is a swing state, which sometimes votes Democratic and sometimes Republican. People there have been known to vote for a presidential candidate of one party while simultaneously voting for the gubernatorial candidate of the opposite party. And in Florida, smelling like a sympathizer of either Fidel or Chavez is simply deadly.
The dogma of taboo themes is not limited to Florida. During the first presidential debate between President Reagan and Walter Mondale, something important happened. Reagan was in a battle for his re-election and, as he was about to deliver his closing remarks, he suddenly went blank and there was an ominous silence as he attempted to remember what he wanted to say but couldn’t. He looked like a disoriented old man unable to remember what he wanted to say. Everyone was talking about the Reagan disaster in that first debate. However, Mondale said something that would, in the long run, hurt him even more. He had said more or less that, “To pay for the indebtedness created by Reagan, I’m going to have to raise taxes.” And that’s something a candidate who wants to win can’t say in the United States of America. Voters are just not reasonable when it comes to taxes. He later acknowledged this when he remarked that although he had won that debate, that exact moment had lost him the presidency.
Trump’s performance as the leader of this nation in the context of the current Covid-19 crisis has been so bad that, within a two week period, the voter’s opinion of his performance dramatically decreased. It dropped from a +22 to a -11– a loss of 33 points in a short period of time. Given the massive coverage that Trump is getting due to the on-going crisis, if he is perceived as handling it properly he will be remembered at election time as the champion of the triumph against the pandemic, and he will be the absolute winner. But if it all ends in a catastrophe with thousands dead or unemployed, and the economy ends in a violent contraction, everything will be blamed on him. And that’s what the polls are saying. That’s why it’s no wonder that he is scolding his campaign team since he is afraid of losing and needs to find someone to blame for his defeat.
President Trump’s campaign knows this, and just as they magnified Sanders’s “communism,” they now want to accuse Biden of being a Fidel sympathizer, because that can give him the triumph in the state of Florida they desperately need.
Biden, in an interview with the CBS’ Miami branch, said he would resume relations with the Cuban government. But he said more— he explained that if he were to win the election, he would require the Cuban government to fulfill the commitments to democratic openness that were part of Obama’s policy toward the island. He said that just like isolating Cuba for 50 years did not work before, it will not work now either. But he said that he would keep the sanctions on individual persons associated with the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, because “acknowledging reality does not mean to stop sanctioning”. However, these details and explanations were NOT included in the information being publicized by the Trump administration—they only included what was politically convenient.
Immediately, Fox News and Breitbar News, communication companies heavily committed to the Republican campaign, began a campaign accusing Biden of supporting the pro-Castro pro-Maduro. elements in Cuba and Venezuela respectively.
Public opinion is very polarized. The contest is so crisp that many Venezuelan and Cuban voters hear that Biden is pro-Chavez or pro-Castro and that is all they hear, so that is what they believe, because they don’t read, they don’t inform themselves, and they don’t analyze.
Trump’s policy toward Cuba and Venezuela has really been unremarkable. He has not succeeded in putting pressure on Venezuela and has not changed the internal system in Cuba. But to make it even worse, he has not helped Cubans fleeing the system. They are being stopped at the Mexican border and returned to Cuba. And with Venezuelans something just as bad is happening. He has told them that all the options are on the table, and that “the aircraft carrier is ready to travel next week” but, other than sanctioning a few individuals, he has done nothing. The easiest thing to do, the one thing he has at hand that would really help Venezuelans who cannot work and who are at risk of being imprisoned or deported, is that of granting them a “special status”, but he does not sign it. He just doesn’t want to do it.
We’ll see a lot of dirty things in this campaign, but what will hurt the most will be the unfulfilled promises. The disappointment of having been deceived and abandoned. Next week’s aircraft carrier will be for the Venezuelans what the Bay of Pigs operation was for Cubans. We’ll see.