Biden Names Ex-Congresswoman Accused of Insulting Cubans a Summit of the Americas Adviser
The White House announced this week that President Joe Biden had appointed former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL) and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) as official advisers for the upcoming Summit of the Americas.
The Summit of the Americas, a regular event bringing together the leaders of countries in the Organization of American States (OAS), is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles in July. The last two iterations of the conference – in 2015 and 2018 – were the first to feature the presence of the Communist Party of Cuba.
The OAS requires all its members to be democracies in its official rules, but following President Barack Obama’s decision to erase large parts of the American embargo on the island dictatorship, the OAS invited the country. Cuban officials proceeded to disrupt the conference by assaulting and heckling human rights leaders and pro-democracy dissidents present at the event on both occasions.
While Cuba’s presence at the summit this year, given that America is hosting, remains unconfirmed, the communist dictatorship’s violent repression of pro-democracy protests last year will likely be a primary topic of discussion.
Mucarsel-Powell represented the largest Cuban-American community in the country while in Congress. She lost her position in 2020 to Cuban-American Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), then the mayor of Miami-Dade County, in a campaign that featured a controversy in which Cuban-Americans expressed outrage at a video of the Congresswoman boasting of defeating the “Republican Cuban establishment” of her state through a megaphone.
“Senator Dodd and Congresswoman Mucarsel-Powell are confident that President Biden will renew and strengthen the collaboration and respect essential for a bright future for the Americas at the upcoming Summit in Los Angeles this June,” the White House announced on Monday. “The Summit of the Americas, the only meeting that brings together the leaders of North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean, will play a central role in shaping the future of the Americas at a critical time in our history.”
Then-Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), and then-Vice President Joe Biden hug at a conference on May 2, 2014, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kris Connor/Getty Images)
Dodd has a history of promoting friendly ties to the Castro regime and has visited the island, and its tyrants, on multiple occasions. Mucarsel-Powell – who is Ecuadorian-American, a country that has faced its own struggles with socialism – has no such history. While in Congress, she openly condemned Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for his public praise of socialism and Fidel Castro. Mucarsel-Powell has also criticized Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for echoing Castro regime talking points on the embargo.
The August 2020 incident in which she appeared to target Cubans as her political rivals nonetheless caused outrage in the Cuban-American community and led to calls for her to apologize. During a campaign stop that month, Mucarsel-Powell praised her own team for defeating her predecessor, former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), a Cuban-American.
“No one thought we’d be able to take the Republican Cuban establishment that has taken ahold of Florida politics for more than 20 years,” Mucarsel-Powell proclaimed through a megaphone.
The organization Facts About Cuban Exiles (FACE) published a letter to Mucarsel-Powell demanding an apology, lamenting that the then-congresswoman appeared to define members of a specific ethnicity as adversaries.
“If she had simply referred to the Republican establishment, FACE … would not have written this letter. But she expanded [it] to ensure that people would know that she was talking about not only the Republican establishment but the Republican Cuban establishment in a pejorative tone,” the letter read in part.
“The fact that many Cubans are Republicans is their right, just as it is for Democrats. The ‘Establishment’ means that voters have established in power those they wish to represent them, and Cubans and non-Cubans have voted just the same in Florida elections,” the group continued.
“Through this means we ask Congresswoman Mucarsel-Powell of District 26 to immediately retract and apologize for her comment of contempt towards the Cuban-American community,” the group demanded.
Gimenez, then a candidate for Congress, condemned Mucarsel-Powell for being “one of the most partisan lawmakers in the United States Congress.”
“Once again, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell insults our community with her divisive words,” he said in a video in response to the incident.
Babalú Blog, a Miami-based site covering Cuban affairs, linked her comments to the general disdain for the Cuban-Americans that the exile community has experienced for decades.
“The Cuban American community has heard you, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell,” writer Alberto de la Cruz said. “Many of us live in your congressional district and we have always known you harbor nothing but disdain for us. Shouting it through a megaphone really wasn’t necessary.”
Mucarsel-Powell’s spokesperson responded to a request for comment on the matter at the time from Miami-based AméricaTeve, highlighting that the congresswoman was “the first South American woman elected to Congress and the only Latina representing Florida” and arguing that her policies benefit Cuban-Americans.
“The Congresswoman represents the most diverse district in the country, including the Cuban community – who support her because they know that she is working for them and to reopen the Cuban Family Reunification Program (CFRP) that was shut down by the Republican President Donald Trump,” the spokeswoman said, dismissing the controversy as “an absurd attempt to distract voters from realizing that the Republican leadership has not managed to control coronavirus, continues its intents to annul medical attention, and has taken us to the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.”
Mucarsel-Powell lost against Gimenez and has since focused on combatting alleged Spanish-language “misinformation” from conservative journalists and media, which she blamed for her defeat.
The former lawmaker’s appointment comes amid a catastrophic fall of support for Democrats in the Hispanic-American community. Multiple recent polls have found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters are leaving the party and supporting Republicans in growing numbers. A national survey published in March by Democrat firm Impact Research and GOP firm Fabrizio, Lee & Associates found that Republicans led Democrats among Hispanic voters by nine percent after polls found the parties essentially tied as recently as November.
Another poll published in March by RMG research found that 48 percent of Hispanics nationally supported Republicans, two more percentage points than those supporting Democrats – a 42-percent swing towards Republicans in four years.
Among the top concerns about Democrats among Hispanics, polls have revealed, are support for socialist policies and the inability to contain inflation.
Democrats have further alienated Hispanic voters through a variety of bizarre moves in the past two years, including calling for a boycott of beloved Hispanic food company Goya, the imposition of the unpopular and phonetically vexing term “Latinx,” and, more recently, reports that President Joe Biden is considering buying crude oil from socialist Venezuela.
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