White House postpones Mike Pence trip to Miami to talk Cuba, Venezuela

Pence
Democrats say Pence, Donald Trump, have not helped Cubans, Venezuelans.

Vice President Mike Pence‘s planned trip to Miami to talk about Venezuela and Cuba has been postponed, the White House announced Thursday.

Earlier in the week the White House announced he would deliver “remarks on the Trump administration’s rejection of the failed ideologies advanced by the dangerous dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba.”

There was no immediate word on when the rescheduled visit might take place.

“The Trump administration has fought these tyrannical regimes by increasing economic pressure, imposing sanctions and through multilateral diplomatic action. The Vice President will echo the Trump administration’s continued support of the Venezuelan and Cuban people as they fight against oppressive regimes and underscore that communism and socialism promise progress and prosperity, but deliver only poverty and corruption,” the announcement added.

In response to the original announcement, two Miami Democratic congresswomen, Reps. Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, belittled President Donald Trump and Pence as talking tough while having no idea what they are talking about with regard to either Cuba or Venezuela.

“Mike Pence — someone who knows nothing about Latin America — is once again coming to Florida, using taxpayer money to try to score political points by misleading South Florida voters,” Mucarsel-Powell stated in a release from the Democrats. “The truth is Donald Trump’s failed leadership hasn’t delivered actual results for the people of Cuba and Venezuela who are suffering at the hands of brutal regimes.”

She called for the Trump administration to “take real action” by passing Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan refugees.

Shalala pointed out that Trump recently said he would meet with Venezuela’s “brutal dictator Nicolás Maduro.”

“Mike Pence is returning to Miami for taxpayer-funded campaign photo op to tout Donald Trump’s ‘support’ for Cubans and Venezuelans — but what does the administration actually have to show for three and a half years in office? Cuba and Venezuela are no closer to democracy, yet detentions and deportations of asylum seekers fleeing these regimes are up,” Shalala stated.

Scott Powers

Scott Powers is an Orlando-based political journalist with 30+ years’ experience, mostly at newspapers such as the Orlando Sentinel and the Columbus Dispatch. He covers local, state and federal politics and space news across much of Central Florida. His career earned numerous journalism awards for stories ranging from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster to presidential elections to misplaced nuclear waste. He and his wife Connie have three grown children. Besides them, he’s into mystery and suspense books and movies, rock, blues, basketball, baseball, writing unpublished novels, and being amused. Email him at [email protected].


4 comments

  • S.B. Anthony

    August 18, 2020 at 11:18 am

    “promise progress and prosperity, but deliver only poverty and corruption”

    Isn’t this the trump administration?

    • Vahe David Demirjian

      August 25, 2020 at 11:50 pm

      Cuba under Fulgencio Batista may have been a dictatorship, but was nonetheless prosperous. The UN Statistical Yearbook for 1957 shows that: (1) Cuba ranked fifth in the region in per capita GDP; (2) infant mortality rates on a par with the United States and Canada, and superior to such countries as France and Belgium; (3) Cuba’s rate of 128 physicians and dentists per 100,000 people in 1957 placed the nation at the same health care level as the Netherlands and ahead of the United Kingdom and Finland; and (4) Cuba was third among Latin American countries in per capita daily caloric consumption.

      Make no mistake: the Cuban people’s democracy got taken away by Fulgencio Batista in 1952, long before Fidel Castro and his henchmen came to power, so in 2022 Cuba will mark its seventh decade without democracy. No one can deny that Fidel Castro drove the Cuban economy to the ground because he thought that total control over the economy would destroy socioeconomic inequalities in Cuba. Team Trump seems to downplay the authoritarianism of Batista and seemingly have a sort of nostalgia for the prosperous times of Batista.

      What Cuba is today is a glaring result of Dwight D. Eisenhower misjudging Fidel Castro’s plans for Cuba, falling for Castro’s pledge to restore democracy to the island after nearly 7 years of dictatorship under Batista.

      Link:
      https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/drl/rls/27198.htm

  • Ronald

    August 18, 2020 at 11:34 am

    The last trip at our dime he run joe biden dien in the gutter at a church where a few hundred people packed like sardines and he didnt have on masks they didnt pan the crowd si dont KNOW if they had on one,Pence stuck upnfor wacky trump inside a church? I hope he prayed for God to forgive wacky trump because when has he told the truth about covid19 or better yet when he going to show some EMPATHY?

  • James R. Miles

    August 20, 2020 at 9:01 am

    Watch out! The socialist bogeyman is coming!

Comments are closed.


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