Senator Marko Rubio, R-Fla., is fighting back after he was exposed juicing up his official biography in order to appeal to the ultra-right. Rubio is known as a tea party Republican who wants to get rid of Medicare and cut back Social Security , according to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Rubio, recently elected to the Senate from Florida, has been touted in some quarters as a potential vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket in 2012, and The New York Times calls him “charismatic.”
The Senator, however, has been exposed as claiming to be the son of Cuban exiles who had to flee the “evil regime of Fidel Castro” to find freedom in segregationist Florida. In fact his parents came over to the Sunshine State in 1956, before the Cuban revolution. So if they were escaping anyone it was Batista and his capitalist dictatorship.
But in Rubio’s version, dished out to Florida voters and, until recently, a part of his official Senate biography, he said his “Cuban-born parents came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.” Well, that has been removed from his official bio when it was pointed out that Cuba was liberated from the Batista dictatorship in 1959 not 1956.
Rubio who once said about his parents that “They were immigrants, and they were also exiles. That is the essence of my story.” The “essence” of his story turns out to be one big fat whopper – not easily digested. Called out on his “exiles” story Rubio said it was “outrageous” to think he might have, as the Times put it “embellished his family story for political advantage.” Duh!
It seems he just got confused about the dates. He said that “In hindsight, I wish I had found out about the dates. But it was not relevant to the important narrative about what my experience was.” Not important! The son of people fleeing communist “tyranny” or just the son of run of the mill immigrants looking for more moolah than they could make under the Batista dictatorship is “not relevant”?
But it is relevant. George Gonzalez, a Cuban-American teaching at the University Miami, is quoted in The New York Times as saying: “Every Cuban-American knows when their parents arrived and the circumstances under which they arrived. That’s part of the Cuban exile experience, the political and psychological trauma of it. So the idea that he was murky on those ideas does not cut ice.”
Most of them chose to come here so it’s not really so much exile as becoming expats.
The people of Florida are stuck with this phony for six years, then they should dump him.
CONTRIBUTOR
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