Top Bay of Pigs veteran rejects brigade Trump endorsement
It’s been a lousy week for President Trump and his Cuban-American supporters in Florida.
In a political blow to Trump only days from the election, José Andreu, a top veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, has told the Miami Herald that he, too, rejects Brigade 2506’s endorsement of the president.
Andreu, 84, is the second prominent member of the tight-knit group of veterans in Cuban-American Miami to publicly reject Trump in a scathing denunciation of his four years in office.
Veteran Santiago Morales, 78, took issue with Trump calling fallen and captured soldiers “losers” and condemned Trump and the Florida GOP for falsely portraying Democrats as socialists and communists on powerful radio and television campaign ads that began airing Tuesday.
Morales endorsed Joe Biden.
Andreu, however, won’t say who he’s voting for, just “not Trump.”
He says he wants “to make clear I’m not taking a partisan position.”
For him, it’s not about endorsing a candidate. He believes members of the veterans association should have the right to express their rejection of Trump and the brigade endorsement without fear of reprisals.
“We need to get rid of Trump,” Andreu told me Thursday in a telephone interview. “Now we have four years of experience and we know what he is.”
Andreu also shared with me a July 10 letter in Spanish he sent to Colonel Johnny López de la Cruz, president of Brigade 2506, asking the Bay of Pigs veterans association to abstain from endorsing any candidate.
DAMNING REBUKE OF TRUMP
This second Trump endorsement by the brigade, Andreu wrote, “would put at high risk our dignity and prestige.” Then, he eloquently summarized the president’s shortcomings in one of the most damning rebukes of Trump I’ve seen from the early “historic” Cuban-exile community.
“As a political leader, Mr. Trump has been disastrous,” wrote Andreu, a former World Bank executive who is registered as an independent voter.
“To begin with, he has destroyed the Republican Party,” he said. “The one of Ronald Reagan, of moderation and coexistence in internal matters and of firmness in foreign relations. He has turned the Republican Party into a party without principles led by leaders who have abdicated all their moral responsibilities to turn into unthinking vassals.”
His words are striking, given the Brigade leadership’s stance and Trump’s portrayal of their endorsement as a show of unanimous backing from the Cuban community.
Trump has hyped the support in tweets and at a Las Vegas rally, where he claimed to have received from Brigade 2506 “a big honor award,” a point of national contention after fact-checkers discovered no evidence of it.
The rest of Andreu’s letter lists wrongdoing by the president familiar to most Americans.
In his words:
Trump has attacked national institutions, including Congress, the Supreme Court and military leadership. He has defamed allies and cultivated relationships with the dictators of Russia, North Korea, Turkey.
“His style of governing is unipersonal, amoral and incompetent,” he wrote.
“He has marked racist, xenophobic and features,” he says.
Trump refuses to make his taxes public and has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic, Andreu laments.
The president makes “ill-timed decisions only to contradict them a short time later.”
He’s not informed because “he doesn’t read even the daily intelligence reports.”
“He governs by superficial, ignorant and defamatory tweets.”
“He only thinks of his personal interest, not of the country. His reelection occupied all his attention from the time of his inauguration as president.”
Trump “gives the impression of being a clown.”
“He can’t live without the spectacle — with himself as the only actor.”
He’s vengeful, defamatory, disloyal.
“He opines about everything without knowing what he’s talking about. Doesn’t consult the experts.”
He governs through Twitter.
Andreu also mentions a fact that should have heavily weighed on other Bay of
Pigs veterans before they embarked on their dalliance with Trump: “Without being a member of the armed forces, he allows himself to slander heroes like John McCain.”
BRIGADE SOLDIER 2501
Andreu and Morales’ rejection of Trump is important because of their place in Cuban history.
Andreu’s serial number as a soldier was 2501, a recognition that he was the first young Cuban recruited while in Havana to be part of a secret invasion of Cuba being planned by the Eisenhower administration.
An embassy attache who knew of his anti-Batista, and afterward anti-Fidel Castro, opposition approached him and he fled Cuba full of idealism to participate in what his father told him was “a suicide mission.”
The brigade is named 2506 after the serial number of member Carlos Rodríguez Santana, who was killed in a training accident. Morales, now a millionaire businessman, was member No. 31, also an early recruit.
Andreu, who speaks several languages, rose to the rank of deputy commander, according to a videotaped interview he gave to the Veterans History project for the Library of Congress. But this was only for four months while in training, Andreu noted. As chief of civil affairs during the invasion, his task was to organize territories secured by the invading force.
But he was captured with his unit and imprisoned with more than 1,200 others for 20 months while a $53 million ransom in food and medical supplies was negotiated with Castro. Sixty of the wounded were released earlier for $2.5 million.
Educated in Europe before Castro, Andreu lived in Washington from 1963 to 2001, when he retired and came to live in Miami. He is the father of former local NBC reporter Patricia Andreu.
COURAGE THEN
AND NOW
Andreu and Morales are right.
The Bay of Pigs association should have never become involved in the presidential election, or endorsed an unsavory character like Trump, who is unworthy of their support.
Brigade leaders also shouldn’t have come to the liar’s rescue when he boasted at a Las Vegas rally and on Twitter that the association gave him “the highly honored Bay of Pigs Award.”
The claim became a point of national contention when fact-checkers could not find any evidence of it.
Andreu, who has contributed funds to the renovation of the Bay of Pigs Museum & Library, says no such award exists.
Trump only got a framed brigade emblem, a memento.
“No,” Andreu said with vehemence when I asked if the award existed.
Andreu and Morales were courageous young men who risked their lives for the cause of a democratic Cuba. Despite their differences, both said they regard their fellow warriors as “brothers.”
Their revelations, their speaking up now at this crucial moment in U.S. history also takes courage, a commodity oftentimes in short supply in MiamiDade.
They have done their patriotic duty once more.
In Florida, this election isn’t only a resistance movement against an autocrat, and what he stands for.
It’s also a battle for the battered soul of Cubanexile Miami.
These veterans have restored some of the lost faith and honor.