Memo to Diaz & DeSantis: Is it ‘gracias, Fidel’ for skills Cubans learned in exile, too? | Opinion

If you follow the Florida GOP’s logic used to set in stone new academic standards for the teaching of Black history, the state’s Cuban Americans — which include Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. — may also have to recast their own chapter.

After all, in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ reinvented Florida, historic evils are entitled to their positive spin.

If Africans kidnapped from their homeland and sold in the Americas as property — people shackled, beaten, raped and forced to labor dawn to dusk for no pay — benefited from slavery because it taught them “job skills,” as Florida middle school students will be told, then what are we Cubans whining about?

Seen in this prism, the Castro brothers did us a favor.

“Does it mean that now we have to say, ‘gracias, Fidel’ for forcing us into exile and being able to learn all these new skills that have enabled us to become successful?” asks Jorge Crespo, a Coral Gables Republican who arrived in Miami at 13 on a Freedom Flight in 1966.

He’s got a point.

All those doctors whose Cuba-issued licenses meant nothing in the past and mean little now picking tomatoes in Homestead and parking cars at the happening Fountainbleau Hotel in the 1960s surely picked up tips on the human condition.

But it’s nothing to rave about! Imagine the advancement of African healers who, in DeSantis’ version of slavery, gratefully turned into “blacksmiths.”

Likewise, for all those teachers like my mother who resigned from their jobs in 1965 Cuba, refusing to indoctrinate children, and came to Miami to pick up the useful new skill of sewing collars at five cents apiece at a factory until her fingers bled.

READ MORE: Critics cite historical inaccuracies in Florida’s defense of slave ‘job skills’ narrative

Lesson in disgust

We’ve learned so much in exile — just about every trick in the American playbook except what democracy really means — giving space to opposing parties and opinions. But who’s counting pecadillos as long as elections are won?

It’s disgusting to deny and whitewash Black history in a state notorious for white racial violence against Blacks, from the massacres of Ocoee and Rosewood to the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford.

This is a time in history that calls for more awareness of facts, not less, and certainly, not sugar-coating.

In Florida, home to Donald Trump, the original divider-in-chief and his disciple DeSantis, prejudice has grown like a wild weed.

In this divided state, men in pick-up trucks can be seen flying the Confederate flag with pride in rural towns and cities up north. At a football game in Jacksonville, the cheer is pierced by an anti-Semitic message projected on a building or flown on an airplane’s tail.

At the Miami-Dade-Broward line on I-75, I saw an old white man drape a Confederate flag over a ramp.

What kind of positive light can the state possibly shine on the infamous 1923 white-on-Black torching of homes, looting of businesses and murders in Rosewood get in Florida lessons full of inaccuracies, as critics charge?

And how shameful it is for us Cuban Americans who have one of us leading the bigotry in Tallahassee.

Diaz, the son of Cuban exiles who settled in Hialeah, should know better than to participate in the mockery DeSantis calls “education.”

“He looks like a sinister figure to me. He’s Cuban. He should know better,” Crespo said.

“A pathetic figure,” Herald reader Freddy Lopez called him in a letter to the editor on Monday denouncing his stance on Black history “as if there had never been Black Cubans anywhere.”

Indeed.

Black history is Cuban history.

Black history is American history.

Thankfully, not all of us Cuban Americans — including Republicans like Crespo, plus Democrats and Independents who write me weekly — approve of Diaz and his ilk.

“My blood boiled,” Crespo, a retired dentist, told me. “Apparently Afro-Americans now have to be thankful for slavery.”

He isn’t a Democrat, but acknowledges that he’s here because of Democratic Party immigration policy — and he has had it with DeSantis’ culture wars and Trump, “who reminds me of Fidel.”

The good news is that DeSantis’ bad education policy is catching up to him on his vapid campaign trail.

Recently asked by journalists to comment on the fact that even his Republican rivals are criticizing him for his revisionist Black history, DeSantis tried to distance himself from his own touted curriculum creation.

“I didn’t do it. I wasn’t involved in it,” he said.

A pants-on-fire lie from the shameless emperor of “anti-woke.”

Miami censors Amanda Gorman’s luminous poem. Will they ban José Martí, too? He was a liberal | Opinion

Doesn’t pass prejudice test

There’s an easy smell test for prejudice: Would what you’re saying about one group stand up when applied to the other?

No, we Cuban Americans would never thank Fidel Castro for our exile.

No, neither would Venezuelans thank Hugo Chavez.

No, there isn’t a single thing to do but reject Nazism.

No, DeSantis’ educational plans for Florida’s children doesn’t pass the prejudice test.

We in South Florida, of all people, should see how wrong it is to dishonor others’ history by making their suffering seem less than it was.

When we denigrate someone else’s history, we dishonor ours, too.