COMMENTARY A book by former Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló and album by "official" Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez are self-serving reminders of what drives their island's exoduses here.
It’s no secret Cubans and Puerto Ricans are the largest diasporas in Florida. And it’s even less of a mystery why so many of them flee their Caribbean islands — places so politically and economically dysfunctional that even life under Joe Carollo offers their kids a saner future.
Still, it’s useful to have reminders — which is what we’re getting right now with the release of a laughable new book from a disgraced former Puerto Rican governor, and a lamenting new album from a regretful, aging Cuban troubadour.
I don’t plan to waste my time reading Ricardo Rosselló’s unbelievably titled The Reformer’s Dilemma. Nor, though I’m sure it has quality tunes, will I likely listen to much of Silvio Rodríguez’s latest work, Quería Saber. But I do find them disturbing reflections of the Puerto Rican and Cuban elites whose abusive and inept rule has driven hundreds of thousands of hapless souls to this peninsula.
READ MORE: Statehood is the best way Puerto Ricans can move beyond Rosselló — and Trump
In the case of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory whose 3 million residents are U.S. citizens, almost a million of them have come to Florida in the past two decades — and politicos like ex-Governor Rosselló are a big reason.
Rosselló was forced to resign in 2019 amid scandal — which featured the corruption arrests of two of his top officials by the FBI and a bungled recovery from Hurricane Maria, including his gross mishandling of the repair of the island’s rotted electric grid and roads. Rosselló, a centrist, became a poster muchacho for Puerto Rico’s rotted political class, which his father, former Governor Pedro Rosselló, had already done a lot to rot back at the turn of the century.
Yet, Ricardo Rosselló somehow managed three years ago, in a controversial write-in campaign, to get elected to Puerto Rico’s shadow delegation to the U.S. Congress.
Since then, he’s waged a cynical image-rehab campaign that now disgorges The Reformer’s Dilemma. In it, he casts himself as a thwarted public-policy visionary instead of the baby-faced brute who was caught in vulgar, leaked chat messages as Governor, yearning to shoot the mayor of San Juan.
It's no secret why folks flee Puerto Rico and Cuba — islands so governmentally dysfunctional that even life under Joe Carollo offers their kids a saner future.
Even if Puerto Ricans wanted to buy Ricardo Rosselló’s self-serving tome, which is doubtful, they’d have a hard time finding it in dark bookstores, thanks to the they’re battling right now — one of “Reformer Rosselló’s” recognizable legacies.
“The audacity to call yourself a swamp cleaner when you were one of the biggest swamp monsters — that’s all too indicative of so much of the Puerto Rican system,” says Mario Catalino, of the Puerto Rican Leadership Council in Miami. “It’s one big reason so many leave.”
Castro's beard
Silvio Rodríguez was once all too representative of the Cuban system. Since the late 1960s, he’s been known as an “official” singer of the island’s communist revolution — a leftist artist whose songs, while perhaps not overt propaganda for that dictatorship, are often lyrical paeans to it.
In 1987, the New York Times said Rodríguez and other oficialista crooners were “as much a symbol of Cuba and its revolution as Fidel Castro and his beard.” In fact, said Castro himself a few years earlier, “the success of Silvio ... [is] the success of the revolution.”
Ah, but now that la revolución has proven a catastrophic failure, the 77-year-old Rodríguez is having an existential crisis.
Many of the tracks on Quería Saber, or I Wanted to Know, are described as mournful reconsiderations of earlier, ideologically correct canciones such as “Pequeña Serenata Diurna,” or “Little Daytime Serenade,” which starts: “Vivo en un país libre / Cuál solamente puede ser libre” (I live in a free country / which can only be free).
“I feel uncomfortable singing that song now,” Rodríguez last week.
Oh, you just now feel uncomfortable warbling about Cuba as a free country? You didn’t feel any misgivings gushing lyrics like that when the song was released in 1975 — the same year the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of political prisoners “gross violations of the right to life, liberty and security of human beings”?
Guess not. So forgive us, Silvio, if we don’t find your change of heart all that more honest than Ricardo Rosselló’s makeover.
You, like him, are part of the elite that’s pushed your island’s people to our peninsula.
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