Miami’s Republican Cuban Americans need to soul search and confront their racism | Opinion

If I thought the narrow-minded way Coral Gables Vice Mayor Vince Lago, former Florida House Speaker José Oliva, and former Miami-Dade Commissioner Bruno Barreiro view race and racism was an exception, I wouldn’t be writing this column.

If I thought the 150 parents who, along with these prominent leaders, signed a letter chastising Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart for addressing race issues in the context of a necessary national reckoning were an insignificant minority, I wouldn’t be writing this column.

But, unfortunately, they’re saying what too many Republican Cuban Americans — and Latin Americans as well — say in private, in public, on social media, on the Nextdoor app and to me in correspondence and in person.

The letter’s authors use religious affiliation to justify prejudice when nothing could be further from the principles of Christianity — and specifically, Catholicism.

A Miami Catholic school confronted racism after George Floyd died. Parents complained.

They use conservatism as an excuse for refusing to even consider that something is rotten in a nation that continues to allow its police officers to kill unarmed Black men, women and teenagers, and use excessive force disproportionately against them.

It’s not just simply “conservative” politics to lambaste the Catholic school where they send their daughters for being inclusive and using terms like “systemic racism” and “social justice” under the cloak of casting these words as “Marxism.”

It’s racism.

And I am ashamed of my people.

Some of my people, I should clarify, because it’s also important to note that there are many of us Cuban Americans and Latin Americans who are sickened by a letter that, while purporting to uphold Catholic principles, is clearly trying to exert influence to wipe out a school’s efforts to become more diverse and inclusive.

“I found it a hateful letter,” said Gloria Artecona Pelaez, an alumni of the now defunct Sacred Heart school in Puerto Rico and a former dean of the School of Education at St. Thomas University.

She is dismayed at finding the names of friends and acquaintances as signatories of a letter sent a month before the November presidential election, but not surprised.

“They put the GOP platform in writing, [that of] the Tea Party people, the hateful people, and those who see communism in every corner,” she said.

To the letter signers, words that Pope Francis himself has evoked, are “tired atheist tropes of division and hopelessness” and “subversive ideology.”

They annotate their claim at the end of the letter this way: “Terms such as systemic racism; marginalized communities, systemic justice and inequality; racial equity; implicit bias, microaggressions, emanate from critical race theory, one of the many offshoots of critical theory, developed at the famous Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s. As a reference, the Frankfurt School was founded with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany.”

Balderdash.

What these parents want is that a school founded on the principles of educating strong, self-sufficient women — with intellectual rigor and through faith — leave behind the element of social consciousness and acquiesce to their separatist politics.

They want their kids educated in the bubble of Coral Gables/Miami Lakes [enter your favorite white Cuban enclave here] whiteness. They don’t want the school instilling in their girls a sense of social awareness when open-mindedness is against their Trumpist creed.

The minority students in the school on scholarship have felt the rejection and have exposed their experiences on social media, prompting the school to take stock. They issued a new mission statement incorporating “social justice, inclusion and diversity” into its Goals and Criteria section, sending the parents into a tizzy.

They wrap it up in the dress of other grievances, but the racism and the Tea Party politics come through loud and clear in their letter signed mostly by people with Spanish surnames.

Once again, I know that I will get mail challenging why I’m “picking on Cubans” or why I’m “anti-Cuban,” which is a foolish thing to say. Writing this stuff hurts me to the core. I am proudly Cuban American.

But the deterioration of this community after Donald Trump took bigotry out of the closet and made it seem mainstream, has set us back decades.

Miami, and especially Cuban-American Miami, was a city proud of being at the cutting edge of demographic changes in the United States. We relished nicknames, “Gateway to the Americas” and “Babel on Biscayne,” and the way we transitioned from cultural and political turmoil to world-class destination.

Drugs and illicit money were the sins. Kooky politicians were almost a birthright.

“City of the future,” the writer T.D. Allman called us.

Now it feels as if another highly contagious virus — the hate bug — is making the rounds in a community that was supposed to have grown up, not regressed to quoting, as the letter writers do, the Catechism of 1935, which has been revised many times over, to take cover from racist inclinations.

Fortunately, the leadership, board of trustees and administration of Carrollton have done the right thing and they’re standing by the school’s new mission statement and the commitment to recruit a more diverse student body.

Kudos to them for seeing through the political chicanery of people like dogmatic Oliva a month before last November’s election, when the letter was sent.

But beyond Carrollton, the bigger issue remains race and the lack of understanding of influential people in Miami-Dade — particularly Cuban Americans who legislate in Tallahassee, Washington, D.C., and county and city halls — about this defining time in history.

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We saw the disdainful, bigoted commentary of elected officials during largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. And we hear the veiled and the blatant racist comments every day in sometimes the most mundane of human interactions.

The letter to Carrollton — orchestrated, racist political theater — is only the latest of many offenses.

This community needs to do a lot of soul-searching, a lot of talking about race and confront the darkness within.

Its name is racism, and Jesus didn’t approve of it.