It’s a given that those politicians making the case for maintaining Cold War relations with Cuba make no sense from the standpoint of what’s good for the United States. For those in South Florida, it’s personal. For others, it’s pandering. But it’s assuredly not what’s best for the U.S.
Exhibit A: The man behind last year’s Florida law that made it more expensive for travel agents to book trips to Cuba. That’s State Rep. David Rivera, a Miami Republican. He couched his Sellers of Travel Act as a “homeland security” issue.
Say what?
We’re in a civilizational war with al Qaeda extremists. We’re increasingly imperiled by the narco murderers from Mexico. Cuba? “Homeland security” issue? They were never even an “axis of evil” hinge.
Specifically, Rivera’s measure requires such travel agencies to post a $250,000 bond and ante up as much as $2,500 in yearly registration fees. It would be ruinous – not just unfair – to a number of those agencies. Last summer, after numerous lawsuits, a federal judge said the Florida law was probably unconstitutional and issued a preliminary injunction. The injunction is still in effect even as the U.S. Justice Department chimed in this week with a report that said, among other things, that Rivera’s act interferes “with the federal government’s ability to speak for the United States with one voice in foreign affairs.”
This really does cut to the geopolitical chase. For too many years, the South Florida exile community – in collusion with feckless Florida pols and their timorous counterparts in Washington – has exercised a de facto foreign policy veto when it comes to Cuban-American relations.
Rivera’s recent response was predictably off the wall. The Justice Department’s opinion, he asserted, “demonstrates that the Obama administration is obviously only interested in kissing up to the Castro regime rather than protecting Florida consumers from the abuses of these travel agencies.”
This isn’t even quality prevarication. In fact, it gives lying a bad name.