Adiós, Donald: I won’t forgive what you did to Miami

Adiós, President Donald Trump. You came to Miami and used our love of homelands lost, our wounds as exiles to manipulate our people into thinking you’d be a messiah for the Americas when you were only thinking about your interests all along. You and only you, first and foremost.

You divided family, neighbors, friends, colleagues.

I’ll never forget that the last time I saw a coworker with whom I shared good times and good work. His look of disgust, then avoidance of me. He didn’t like my columns exposing your racism and anti-immigrant agenda.

He died, and that’s how you left things between us.

He, dazzled by your promises of a free Cuba and your Make America Great Again charade. Me, chronicling the damage done to the soul of a city that uplifted, not rejected, immigrants until you came along, demanded acquiescence, and the spineless Republican leadership complied.

Always the campaigner and never the leader the nation needed, you turned toxic campaign lines into toxic policies that separated families, ripping children from their parents’ arms. Your nasty, soul-crushing rhetoric had people in this town who came as children and who know the suffering justifying you. They should have known better.

No matter the issues, no matter the politics, I had never felt ashamed of my community — until you came along, appealed to the worst in us and stunk up Miami-Dade with fumes of racist, homophobic, classist evil.

I am still broken inside from seeing and hearing my people turned into wholesale liars and fascists, echoing you and your whitesupremacist dog whistles. They not only hurt Miami, they also put in jeopardy the cause of a free Cuba. You lose advocates and allies when you act like you want to replace communism with fascism.

I may forgive (though never forget) the walking wounded in Miami-Dade who fell for your falsehoods, but I won’t forgive you, the Chusma-in-Chief, who elevated the vulgar to presidential heights.

Joe Biden will be the healing voice this community and America need.

Good riddance to you — no thanks to battleground Florida in which your surrogates resurrected its dormant Jim Crow ways in a pitiful attempt to disenfranchise Blacks and Latinos, part of a social-engineering experiment you and your advisors concocted to halt the browning of America.

Hello, President Joe Biden. Hello Vice President Kamala Harris, history-maker, the first woman to hold that office in a country that, at least in its politics, is more machista than Latin America.

Thank you, Pennsylvania, cradle of the Declaration of Independence.

In Florida, Biden couldn’t shake the lies you and the GOP told. The disinformation campaign you ran calling Democrats radical socialists and communists ran deep and dark, and Biden lost the state.

Thankfully, the rest of the nation didn’t need Florida to send you packing to your former “Winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago.

But, ugh, to have you as a full-time Florida resident now.

What a curse: more of you. You’ll be happy in this state, solidly in Republican control now thanks to you. No doubt, your faithful soldiers, led by your disciple Gov. Ron DeSantis, will continue singing your praises and spinning the undemocratic falsehood that the election was stolen from you till kingdom come.

They will continue using their alliance with you to uplift themselves, making bad political trouble when what they should be doing is helping heal the country, our state, our neighborhoods.

But I hope you’ll tire of us. I hope your change of address to South Florida was only for show and motivated by our accessible and expedient (in most cases) vote-bymail system, the one you continue to degrade with lies.

Why don’t you stay away locked up in your gaudy Trump Tower?

Or claim asylum in Russia? Anywhere but here will do.

We’ve got a lot of mending to do here.

You were the caudillo we fled, no savior of Cuba or Venezuela or Nicaragua, and you almost destroyed the best of the United States, its democratic checks and balances, in four endlessly long years.

Unfortunately, Trumpism will linger the way Castroism does in Cuba and Chavismo in Venezuela. That’s the legacy of dictatorships, authoritarianism and populism.

For now, all we can do is celebrate that your re-election campaign is dead, grateful for the good sense of other battleground states in the nation.

“I’d been waiting to fly my flag until it had the correct meaning again!” texted my friend Ileana Oroza, a retired Cuban-American journalist and educator, with a photograph of Old Glory flying in the wind from her balcony in Miami Beach.

I choked up when she sent it, this symbol of democracy and decency prevailing in our country.

Adiós, Donald Trump. Good riddance to your brief, dishonest and hateful reign.