Sen. Bob Menendez can be both corrupt and right about Cuba’s human-rights abuses | Opinion

A growing number of Democrats are calling, as they should, for the resignation of one of their own — senior U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, who just pleaded not guilty to serious bribery charges. And he has done a lousy job of explaining the evidence against him as Cuba-trauma related.

I agree: Menendez, who chairs the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, should resign.

Not only because of the serious nature of the charges he’s facing, but for the lame excuse he’s offering as a way to gain sympathy. If found guilty, I hope he serves time in a special jail cell made just for politicians who try to dodge criminal wrongdoing by using, for personal gain, the legitimate story of Cuban suffering under 64 years of dictatorship.

Speaking from the second metaphorical capital of the historic Cuban exile, Union City, the New Jersey senator tried to explain away the almost $500,000 in cash the feds found in his home safe as something Cuban Americans do as a result of what we went through in Cuba under Fidel Castro’s regime.

“For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account, which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba,” Menendez, 69, said at a press conference after his indictment on corruption charges by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.

“Now this may seem old-fashioned,” he added, “but these were monies drawn from my personal savings account based on the income that I have lawfully derived over those 30 years.”

READ MORE: Sen. Bob Menendez pressured prosecutors, leaked intel for gold, cash and car, feds say

Who does the New York City-born Cuban-American Menendez think he’s fooling with the ethnic-identity appeal?

For starters, he’s been charged with corruption before.

Thanks to a mistrial, he beat a 2015 indictment on charges that he accepted gifts from a Florida eye doctor in exchange for using his Senate office to benefit the man’s financial and personal interests.

The charges he faces now — that he allegedly leaked sensitive information to the Egyptian government for profit and sought to influence criminal cases against businessmen who paid him for this — are worse. But he expects us to believe that evidence of unusually big cash was found because he hid it thinking that communism might be coming to the United States to confiscate what rightfully belongs to us?

Please.

READ MORE: Running to unseat Rick Scott, Democrat Mucarsel-Powell calls on Bob Menendez to resign

Cuba cause legitimate, excuse not

I, a Cuban American, don’t buy that lame excuse for hiding half a million in cash — plus, 1-kilo gold bars worth $100,000 and $70,000 in the safe of his wife, Nadine, also charged.

He did a lousy, unconvincing job of defending himself with that tactic, causing people who supported him and the cause of a democratic Cuba anger, disappointment and sadness.

The life-long work he has done exposing the Cuban regime’s true facade and giving political prisoners visibility, especially in the U.S. Senate, was important. So much so that it didn’t take long for the left’s international propaganda machine to use the corruption charges against Menendez to dismiss his stance on Cuba’s human-rights abuses as the work of a charlatan.

Government repression in Cuba is real, but Menendez’s money story falls from the weight of his own history.

His parents — father, Mario, was a carpenter and mother, Evangelina, a seamstress — left Cuba in 1953 when the country was ruled by another dictator, Fulgencio Batista, the darling of the American mafia.

The son they named Robert was born months later on Jan. 1, 1954, in New York City.

Perhaps the family they left behind in Cuba suffered in later years from Castro’s wholesale confiscations of homes and businesses, and the establishment of an authoritarian state.

But their son grew up in the comfort of Union City, where exiles arrived later and, through the power of education, became a lawyer.

He went to work as an aide to Union City Mayor William Musto, his induction into politics, becoming the youngest candidate to win election to the Union City Board of Education soon after. A centrist Democrat, he mostly voted with Republicans on foreign policy and was a respected figure in Miami.

He had the standard American rise in politics — from local office to the U.S. Senate, and bipartisanship seemed to define him.

He would’ve better served himself by using a historical American analogy like the Great Depression as an excuse for the cash found in the federal raid of his home. The banks might plummet! Crash on Wall Street!

But instead, he chose the go-to justification of hypocrites who use the cause of a free Cuba as an excuse for bad behavior in the United States.

Surely, the kind of trauma some of us lived through while in Cuba — and then, leaving everything and everyone we loved behind — can manifest in our lives in deeply rooted ways.

I remember the illegal trip to buy food in the countryside and being stopped at a checkpoint one night, knowing my mother was hiding our black market stash under her blouse, pretending to be pregnant. I’m sure this adds another layer of subconscious stress at a traffic stop or the TSA line, but it doesn’t keep me from driving or traveling.

I remember when fatigue-clad milicianos stormed our house and forced us to leave it with only a small suitcase stuffed with a change of clothes for each of us. And that I was told to pick only one doll from a sofa lined up with them, presenting a cruel choice for a frightened 10-year-old. Then, they taped our door shut behind us.

But, although I bless my house every time I return from a trip, I don’t hog dolls, stash money or think the government is going to take it. I withdraw cash only when a hurricane threatens us, as Christmas gifts or to pay the gardener. And not even that now, as virtually every house-care vendor takes Zelle. I like the paper trail.

No, hiding assets isn’t therapy for trauma.

Neither Menendez nor his parents lived through any of that trauma, though his constituents, to whom he owes better, did.

For Menendez and his wife’s sake, I hope their bank records can prove prosecutors wrong.

But, more important, I hope Americans don’t view his stance against human-rights abuses in Cuba through the lens of his indictment.

Sen. Bob Menendez can be both — corrupt and right about Cuba’s brutality.