Election Day 2008

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, but the special election to be held here next Tuesday has many people wondering if the laws of physics and politics have been temporarily conjoined. On Election Day, Florida’s Cuban Americans will go to the polls twice—once to vote for America’s next president, and again to determine Cuba’s.

Exactly how the winner might actually take office is unclear. Jiménez, who on weekends conducts military-style maneuvers with a brigade of like-minded compatriots in the Everglades, says he has an army “equipped and ready to assert my presidency.”

And I am sure his first order of business after taking Havana would be to hold Free and Fair Elections among the people who now live in Cuba.

The so-called elecciónextraordinaria y democracia in absentia is the brainchild of Jorge Menos Canosa, a prosperous leader of the Cuban expatriate community in Miami and, like most of his countrymen who arrived in Florida after the revolution, a fierce opponent of the Castro regime. He gained prominence in 1971 when he flew a blimp festooned with anti-Castro slogans over a soccer game outside Havana. He barely eluded the Cuban MiG fighters that were scrambled to shoot him down.

As he told TheMiami Herald last summer, the idea of holding Cuba's first democratic election—in the United States—came to him “between three and four in the morning,” during a “very robust” night of celebrating following the death of Ramon Castro, Fidel's younger brother, who succeeded Fidel after his recent death.

Anyone who can avoid a MiG fighter while in a blimp is a true man of action. Maybe not 5 stars in the planning and forecasting dept, but ... could you see Rambo attacking Vietnam with a blimp?

Also - when did Ramon die? Death by sibling?

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