Cuban officials’ visit to Miami airport required greater transparency, but pols’ outrage is misplaced | Opinion

There are two things that are outrageous about the tour of Miami International Airport that the federal Transportation Security Administration gave a delegation of Cuban officials a week ago.

The first outrageous thing is, well, the outrage — because the tour itself was not outrageous.

It was, by all accounts, a benign exercise in bilateral aviation security cooperation that the U.S. ought to be conducting with Cuba, since about 30 flights move between Miami and Havana on most days.

Given that most of the passengers on those flights are Cuban Americans, you’d think Miami’s politicians — no matter how much this community understandably despises and distrusts Cuba’s communist dictatorship — would want to make sure airport safety is in sync on both sides of the Florida Straits. The U.S., after all, follows similar joint air safety protocols with other regimes Americans despise and distrust, like communist China’s.

But this is Miami, where it’s custom to shoot from the hysterical hip first and ask adult questions later — if ever. So every politico who can find a microphone or a reporter’s handheld recorder is screaming that the Biden administration just gave masked Marxist ninjas the keys to MIA’s air traffic control tower.

Nevertheless, the second outrageous thing is how outrageously optics-oblivious the TSA looks right now. It apparently did not give Miami-Dade County officials, who run MIA, a heads-up that the Cuban apparatchiks would visit secure airport areas like checkpoints.

That matters because the U.S. still has Cuba on its state sponsors of terrorism list. Granted, on May 15, the Biden administration removed Cuba from its list of countries that don’t help in the fight against terrorism — and there is no reason except Miami politics that Cuba still belongs on the more serious state sponsors list. But TSA should have reassured Miami-Dade officialdom beforehand that these Cuban tours at U.S. airports are beneficial as well as routine.

In fact, they took place even when Donald Trump, every hardline Cuban exile’s divine instrument on Earth, was president.

The bottom line: somebody, anybody at TSA should have taken into more sensitive account that this is Miami, for God’s sake! Any issue here that involves Cuba, whether it’s transportation security or ropa vieja recipes, is an anti-comunista powder keg that shameless political climbers can ignite under the slightest pretext to scare votes their way.

The TSA might have made a mental note, for example, that the Miami fuse is especially short these days when it comes to Cuban espionage. It was only a few months ago the world learned that former top U.S. diplomat and now convicted spy Manuel Rocha was a loyal spook for the Cuban regime for years, including the time he worked at the U.S. mission in Havana.

Rocha’s case has heaped a certain PTSD on the Cuban-American community — which still remembers the Cuban spy network that slithered into Miami and was responsible for four Cuban exiles getting shot down and murdered in small aircraft near Cuba by regime fighter jets in 1996.

The TSA might have recalled that historical nugget before hosting a Cuban delegation at Miami’s airport this week without notifying Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava — a Democrat whose re-election effort you’d think the Biden administration would want to assist this year.

But it undermined it instead by bringing Cuban communists to MIA without pre-advising the locals — on, of all days, May 20, the 1902 Cuban independence day that Cuban exiles celebrate.

In a larger sense, that’s a reminder that Beltway Democrats still really don’t get the reality that Florida Latinos are not the Latinos the party takes for granted in the rest of the country.

It’s reminiscent of the Biden administration’s move a few years ago to take Colombia’s defunct Marxist guerrilla army, the FARC, off the U.S.’s terrorist list. That was good policy served with bad optics: It failed to consult Florida’s large Colombian community, a bitter swath of whom suffered FARC violence.

Still, all those outraged Miami politicos who are sure TSA exposed MIA to the DGI (Cuba’s spy service) might themselves remember Cuba also has aviation security concerns. It has ever since Cuban exile terrorists carried out the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger airliner that killed all 73 people onboard.

That, too, was an outrage.

Tim Padgett is the Americas Editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.