Analyst's new job: visualizing Cuba after Castro dies (It's Raul, he says)

[RagingInMiami]

The secrets landed on Brian Latell's CIA desk from just about everywhere: spy satellite photos, reports from infiltrators in the Cuban government, communications intercepts, U.S. spies debriefing Cuban intelligence officers begging for asylum.

The analyst would weigh each, assign levels of urgency, then pass the scoops up the U.S. chain of command, where top officials from the secretary of state to the president used them for decades to formulate Cuba policy and to try to understand Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Today, eight years into his retirement from his post as a top intelligence official in charge of Latin America and Cuba, Latell is using his analyst skills to decipher another complex place: Miami.

Now, instead of keeping mum in public about what he knows about Cuba, he's helping shape public opinion about the communist island's future. Instead of poring through reams of secret reports, he's lecturing as an academic for the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/14719744.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. Maybe the Miami Mafia can take back to Cuba some of that political

expertise that turned Miami into a multiple winner of the United States Census Bureau's "Poorest city in the United States with a population over 500,000."

They might be able to impress Cubans with stories of how the FBI named Miami "Terror Capital of the United States," and how they helped Miami gain #1 status in murders multiple times.

Then, they can show Cubans how they arranged election fraud so odious people far away from Florida smelled it, and read about it in their own newspapers and magazines.

They can remind Cubans how they claimed that when they came to Miami they found it to be a "sleepy little fishing village," and after they got finished with it, Miami was a "world class city." They won't need to mention how Miami emptied out rapidly of its original citizens.

Cubans will listen enthralled at the story of how a reporter from the Spanish newspaper "El Pais" interviewed the pompous, swaggering little tumor, Jorge Mas Canosa, who imagined himself King of Miami, about the fall of Cuba:

The reporter had asked if the Americans would ''take over'' Cuba after Fidel Castro's fall. Mas Canosa reportedly replied, ''That's bull----. They haven't even been able to take over Miami. If we kicked them out of here, how could they possibly take over our own country?''
(snip)

http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/caricature112497.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sure hope they'll be taking all those fine "exile" politicians back home, as well, like this one:

Stalin Would Be Proud
And only Kafka could have dreamed up a character like Rudy Garcia
By Tristram Korten
Article Published May 1, 2003

DetailsThe dismissal of six workers from a local office of the Department of Children and Families is one of the most surreal governmental dramas to play itself out in some time. Certainly you recall the incident. On March 4 an aide to state Sen. Rudy Garcia was accompanying the senator's 94-year-old grandmother to the Hialeah DCF office to inquire about her food-stamp eligibility. The aide, Francis Aleman, claims she and Garcia's abuela were treated rudely. She complained to DCF brass in Tallahassee and voilà, everyone up the chain of command got the axe. Garcia happens to sit on two committees that fund and supervise DCF, and the senate is about to vote to confirm DCF Secretary Jerry Regier's permanent appointment.

Two of the fired employees had not even worked at the Hialeah office for one and a half months. They never saw, heard, or talked to the grandmother. The day they were canned they must have felt like characters in a Kafka novel, complete with self-important politicians (and their aides), obsequious bureaucrats, and a labyrinthine system so mindless that once set in motion, it couldn't be stopped.

This is as absurd as it gets. First, what the hell is the grandmother of a state senator doing on food stamps? Much less a senator who in 2001 listed his net worth as $100,212, and his income as $63,829. "She's an American citizen and she wants her independence," Garcia explained to me. "I can't tell her what to do. This is a nominal amount, around $30 a month."

Then the senator, who earns $29,328 as a legislator and derives the rest of his income from a family flooring and tile business in Hialeah, added, "We're not a rich family."
(snip/...)

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/issues/2003-05-01/news/korten.html



Senator Garcia

[RagingInMiami]

7. Miami is no longer the poorest city in the country

It is now the third poorest.

Miami is still not a world-class city although people who've never left Miami like to believe that.

Miami was never a "sleepy fishing village" either. It went from a town to a city overnight, which is why it earned the nickname "The Magic City" in the early 1900s.

In the 1920s, Miami had the tallest skyscraper south of Baltimore. It was also Al Capone's winter retreat, where he was located at when the St. Valentine's Day Massacre went down.

In the 1930s, Overtown, a black neighborhood north of downtown Miami, was nicknamed "Little Broadway" because Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Count Blasie and Ella Fitzgerald performed there frequently.

Miami was built on fraud and shysters. Political corruption was here long before the Cubans. The Cubans just kept the tradition going with an added Latin American flavor.

Miami status as #1 in murders was during the early 1980s after the Mariel boatlift, when Castro opened his jails and allowed 25,000 convicts to join 100,000 Cubans to go to Miami.

This was also a time when the Colombians were swarming Miami's streets with cocaine, shooting each other in shopping malls, expressways and restaurants in a bloody turf war.

It was also during an era of high racial tension, which included two riots that resulted in numerous deaths, after white police officers killed black civilians.

All that being said, Miami is the youngest large city in the United States, having been established in 1896, the same year New York incorporated the five boroughs to begin its path to world-class status.

Miami has gone through more turmoil than most cities twice its age. Crime is down, racial tensions have improved and the Cuban hard-liners are dying off. Miami-Dade County went blue in every presidential election since 1996.

I have no doubt Miami will become a world-class city within a generation or two.

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Years ago I asked a Cuban woman that I worked with

why no one had killed Castro yet. She said that if they killed Castro, Raul would take over and that he was worse.

How much is this guy getting paid to tell us something the Cubans have known for decades?

[RagingInMiami]

5. I've always heard that myself

But who knows what the truth is. The only thing that is certain is that Raul lacks Fidel's charisma. So I really don't know how long he would be able to rule after Fidel's death because the Cubans view Fidel as a God.

[TomClash]

3. Other really difficult Cuban predictions

After Castro's demise, Cuba will remain an island.

Sometime in the future a hurricane will probably hit Cuba.

Cubans will continue to play baseball after Castro dies.

Upon Castro's death, Cuban men and women will continue to have sex.

[yellowcanine]

6. Cuban baseball player will continue to emigrate to the U.S. where

they will be welcomed as refugees seeking freedom, not to mention 7 figure salaries.

[robcon]

4. Like Kim in North Korea, Castro is trying to start a dynasty.

This is not exactly a breaking story.