Cuban radio won’t know what hit them

Having concluded during the first year of the Obama presidency that even mild doses of Cuban talk radio whitened my nose hairs, I ceded listening to the aging and the calcifying. Readers living elsewhere can’t know the shockwaves sent when a consortium of former Obama and Hillary Clinton aides joined with George Soros to buy Miami’s Radio Mambí and WQBA from TelevisaUnivision; imagine Bernie Sanders running for Vermont’s Republican Party chair for an equivalence. If Miami Hispanics younger than fifty don’t listen to those stations, they live with someone older who does or know someone who does. Their hosts, who if you saw at the Publix deli counter would say hello and cede their place in line on your behalf, spend hours a day lying. On Jan. 6 they claimed Trump voters were outside the Capital while those inside were — wait — Antifa.

Now that Mambi’s new owners demonstrated their fealty to capitalism, the current tenants and their statewide satraps are going waaaaaaa:

The event featured speeches by Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez, state Sen. Ileana García, state Rep. Tom Fabricio and Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo, who recalled the community service provided by the stations and the updated information on the situation of political prisoners, the Ladies in White and opponents on the island.

In her speech, Núñez said that she grew up listening to Radio Mambí, which became a benchmark in her political education.

“Since I was a little girl, my dad insisted on turning on the radio every morning on the way to school. I used to tell him, ‘Daddy, why do I have to listen to this again?’ and he ignored me, and it’s good that he didn’t because today my 23-year-old daughter, since she was a child, has also been listening to those radio programs,” she said.

For Núñez, the sale of the radio stations could have an impact on the access that young people have to historical information on the human rights violations committed in Cuba.

“We cannot let our youth not be informed firsthand of the harm of communism. It is important for young people to know because today we are seeing a very dangerous movement,” she emphasized.

Note the way Núñez’s bathetic croaking precipitates an admission of indoctrination if not another lie — unless readers believe her grown-ass daughter enjoys the profundities of Ninoska Pérez Castellón while muted on a Zoom call. Presumably the lieutenant-governor’s daughter can withstand exposure to AOC’s tweets or her education’s been worthless. Deal, snowflakes.

To accuse the radio mambíses of grift elides the real interstices of memory, nostalgia, and power of which the upper strata of exile life is composed; but like millions of other stormtroopers in the Trump horde my parents’ generation of naturalized Cuban Americans they see the glint of the guillotine from their gated three-bedroom homes in Coral Estates and Olympia Park; they panic when their nieces and godchildren, realizing Tucker’s worst fulminations, identify as gender-neutral. A plutocrat like Soros joining forces with Obamans and Clintonites, using capitalistic methods to create a playing field that might one day be level? Cubans see the hour of their doom.