The Political Whore

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By Manny Leto
PoHo contributor and editor, Cigar City Magazine

You may not have even known it was happening, but “Rapprochement With Cuba: Good For Tampa Bay, Good For Florida, Good For America,” a conference sponsored by the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation and held Saturday at the Italian Club in Ybor City, was, by its very existence, a milestone in repairing the tattered relationship between Tampa and Cuba.

About 150 guests, panelists, professors and local politicians filled the grand, neo-classical Italian Club, once the social, cultural and political epicenter of Tampa’s Italian community. Whether the speeches, panel discussions, and networking sessions will really accomplish much toward ending the 50-year-old U.S. embargo, no one is really sure. However, to get a sense of where the Cuba barometer is pointing, you could start with the venue itself.

In 1955, a young, verbose Fidel Castro arrived in Ybor City. This was no accident, no anomaly. In fact, it made perfect sense. Castro, in a bid to gain popular support for his uprising against CIA-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, he followed — literally — in the footsteps of an earlier young, charismatic Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sun-Sentinel has done a helluva job piecing together a tough story without any help from Florida’s “transparency” governor, Charlie Crist.

The upshot: The gov takes a lot of flights on private jets owned by some of the wealthiest and influential Florida corporate titans – or those who are angling to be. And his office doesn’t keep records on the flights.

From the story this weekend:

Crist regularly flies on the private jets of wealthy businessmen, the Sun Sentinel found, but the governor won’t disclose the details.

Over the past two years, Crist’s calendar shows about 100 occasions when he was scheduled to fly in or out of private air terminals to get to the capital, concerts, dinners, sporting events, political appearances and stays in St. Petersburg and South Florida.

Crist’s office would not reveal who paid for specific flights or answer questions about them, despite the governor’s vow of transparency when he took office. “Our constitution requires that our government be open and transparent,” Crist said in his January 2007 inaugural address. “And under my administration it will be like never before.”

It’s a must-read. The full story here.