Political piñata. Part 2.

By Gonzalo López Martí    – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• The new occupant of White House has proven that Latinos not only are unnecessary to win elections: we are the perfect political piñata to unleash a witch hunt on.
• How are we supposed to convince CEOs and CMOs that they must spend their marketing dollars in Hispanic media now?
• As we discussed on the first installment of this column (*) the GOP won the White House, the Senate & the House essentially using Mexicans as their bogey man.
• What made you think that Democrats were just going to sit still and not retaliate against the Cubans who supposedly swung Florida to the Trump side?
• You still waiting for the tweet from the POTUS reinstating the so-called “wet foot-dry foot” policy that Obama did away with?
• Don’t hold your breath.
• Why would this government or any government make an exception with Cubans when millions of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorans, Bolivians and even Chinese for that matter live under communist, authoritarian or totalitarian regimes?
• If Cubans are allowed into the country due to humanitarian reasons, why not do the same with, say, Haitian, Iranian or Sudanese fugitives?
• I’m playing devil’s advocate here, of course.
• Let me remind you once again that the new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is an alleged Klan sympathizer who’s made ending immigration (illegal and legal too) pretty much the sole issue of his lifelong judicial and political career.
• In any case, how did we turn our community from electoral king maker to political football?
• Let’s stop looking for culprits.
• We might’ve brought this upon ourselves.
• We might only have ourselves to blame.
• Voter turnout among Latinos is alarmingly low.
• Still.
• After all these years.
• Hispanic politicians show a notorious penchant for inconsistency, discord, telenovela-style disarray and melodrama (see Marco Rubio’s bad case of Tillerson flip flopping).
• There’s some kind of warped pecking order in the Hispanic community that only amounts to self sabotage.
• Don’t look the other way.
• You know what I’m talking about.
• Petty skirmishes, backstabbing, intrigue and outright hostility among Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Dominicans et al are way too frequent in politics, showbiz, sports, the workplace, the streets.
• Then again, there’s the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and everybody else vs Cubans feud.
• The logic being that Cubans are Republicans and the rest are Dems.
• You might say that the “all Cubans vote Republican all the time” mantra ceased to be true 8 years ago, when Miami-Dade went for Obama.
• Yup.
• Who knows.
• In any case: WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO NOW, AS A COMMUNITY & AS AN INDUSTRY?
• Let’s see.
• Disclaimer: I consider meeself  a libertarian.
• I live and die by one tenet: individual responsibility.
• We are the architects of our own destiny.
• Against my own anti-collectivist instincts, I’d dare say the only way out of this conundrum is unity.
• I tend to shy away from the temptations of the “herd mentality”.
• We’re all in this country fleeing collectivism in its various manifestations.
• However, it might be time for us Hispanics to start voting as a block.
• We can’t sit still while our interests and our good name are ignored or trampled on by the powers that be.
• The road ahead will be tough.
• In the current context, if you are a Cuban American politician (even if you are Republican) you are now regarded as irrelevant outside of the MiamiDade county line.
• If you are a Mexican American Democratic politician, well, you’d better find a job in the private sector pronto.
• To be continued.

(*) Political piñata. Part 1:  https://hispanicad.com/agency/business/political-pi%C3%B1ata