Trump's 'vermin' smears evoke 'sinister' flashbacks for Cuban exile
Donald Trump is targeting Latino voters by portraying himself as a victim of communist persecution — but he's giving one such voter horrific flashbacks.
The former president evoked Adolf Hitler when he described his political enemies as "vermin," but Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago — one of the nation's 2 million Cuban exiles — said she was instead reminded of the communist dictator Field Castro.
"If there’s anything that stands out in my childhood in Cuba, it’s being labeled a gusana — worm in my neighborhood, and most ferociously, in school — after it became known that my parents were leaving the country, and my father was sent to labor in the agriculture fields as punishment," Santiago wrote.
Santiago expressed disgust toward Hialeah, Florida, mayor Esteban Bovo for asking the city council to name a street after the criminally charged ex-president, which she called "a dishonor to our history."
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"Tyrants — and would-be tyrants like Trump, who carry within them the disposition to, as his campaign threatened Monday, see to it that critics are 'crushed' — seem to refer to insects, invertebrates, to humiliate and dehumanize opponents," she wrote.
Like Trump with vermin, Castro first used the term gusanos, in a fiery 1961 speech in reference to counter-revolutionaries. He spoke of 'shaking the rotten tree, and the gusanos will drop out.'"
Castro slurred Cubans fleeing his regime as "worms" and "scum," a term which they carried into their early days as exiles, and Santiago said Trump demonized his own countrymen and countrywomen for the same reasons.
"Castro didn’t follow Karl Marx’s playbook to establish a Communist state for all. He followed Hitler and Francisco Franco in Spain," Santiago wrote. "Castro used communism to gain allies and enable what Trump wants the United States to be: his personal fiefdom. Nothing short of idolatry will do."