‘Gracias, Fidel’: Cuban columnist ridicules DeSantis' positive spin on 'historic evils'

A Cuban American columnist skewered Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Sunshine State’s Department of Education over its controversial new academic standards that suggests some slaves benefited from the skills they acquired in captivity.

Fabiola Santiago wrote sarcastically for The Miami Herald that the new standards should include positive spins on additional “historic evils,” suggesting that Cuban Americans including Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. “may also have to recast their own chapter.”

Santiago wrote that, “If Africans kidnapped from their homeland and sold in the Americas as property — people shackled, beaten, raped and forced to labor dawn to dusk for no pay — benefited from slavery because it taught them “job skills,” as Florida middle school students will be told, then what are we Cubans whining about?”

“Seen in this prism, the Castro brothers did us a favor.”

Jorge Crespo, a Coral Gables Republican who arrived in Miami at 13 on a 1966 Freedom Flight posed the question: “Does it mean that now we have to say, ‘gracias, Fidel’ for forcing us into exile and being able to learn all these new skills that have enabled us to become successful?”

Santiago writes that the efforts to rebrand historic evils are rooted in racism, noting that in today’s Florida “men in pick-up trucks can be seen flying the Confederate flag with pride in rural towns and cities up north,” and that during a football game in Jacksonville “the cheer is pierced by an anti-Semitic message projected on a building or flown on an airplane’s tail.”

Santiago wrote that, “It’s disgusting to deny and whitewash Black history in a state notorious for white racial violence against Blacks, from the massacres of Ocoee and Rosewood to the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford.”

“This is a time in history that calls for more awareness of facts, not less, and certainly, not sugar-coating.”

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