Gov. DeSantis said Thursday that Cuban Americans need to stop blocking roads in Miami to express solidarity with anti-government protesters in Cuba.
Governor tells protesters rallying in solidarity with Cuban people
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday that Cuban Americans need to stop blocking roads in Miami to express solidarity with anti-government demonstrators in Cuba.
“We can’t have that,” he said at a news conference in Miami. “It’s not something that we’re going to tolerate.”
The message didn’t get out — or wasn’t heeded. About 5 p.m. Thursday, WSVN-Ch. 7 video showed demonstrators in an intersection in Hialeah. WFOR-Ch. 4 and WPLG-Ch. 10 reported that city officials said roads would be closed at the demonstration, where participants chanted “Libertad!” and carried Cuban flags and signs. The location was near the Palmetto Expressway/State Road 826.
As protesters were closing down the Palmetto earlier in the week DeSantis said they were clearly not violating the spirit of the state’s controversial new anti-protest law that he championed. The Floridians protesting what was happening in Cuba were “peacefully assembling,” he said.
Besides the closure of the Palmetto and Southwest Eighth Street in Miami, demonstrators blocked roads Tuesday in Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville. Demonstrations that closed roads also took place on Wednesday.
Most prominent was the protesters’ shutdown of the Palmetto for some seven hours, including the afternoon-evening rush hour. The Florida Highway Patrol warned that the shutdown was illegal, but for hours didn’t try to clear the highway. The Miami Herald reported close to 1,000 protesters were blocking the expressway.
In Miami, the city Police Department said motorists should be patient with traffic snarls, which it attributed to people exercising their First Amendment rights.
DeSantis, who has assiduously courted Cuban American voters and community leaders, parted ways with the demonstrators — just on this one issue.
“It’s dangerous for you to be shutting down a thoroughfare. You’re also putting other people in jeopardy. You don’t know if an emergency vehicle needs to get somewhere and then obviously it’s just disrespectful to make people stand in traffic,” he said.
He said peaceful protestors have the right to express their views. “But it can’t be where you shut down commerce or you shut down the ability to use these arteries. It’s very important that people are able to get, especially in a place like Miami where the traffic can be really bad, and, again, again you never know someone may need to get to a hospital or something like that.”
Separately, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw offered a similar message: “If you’re going to protest, we support you and we have your back, just do so where you are not blocking roadways where emergency vehicles might need to come through,” he wrote on Twitter.
New law
The blocking of Florida’s major roads by protesters sparked discussion about the state’s new anti-protest law — championed and signed by DeSantis in response to 2020 social justice demonstrations the MAGA movement didn’t like. Police in Miami-Dade County gave more leeway this week to protesters shutting down highways than they did to protesters who shut down highways in 2020.
The law makes illegal some of what anti-Cuban government protesters have been doing this week. DeSantis said Thursday that the anti-riot law wasn’t aimed at those he termed peaceful protesters, like those who have taken to the streets this week. Rather, he said, it was aimed at cracking down on violent protests.
When he signed the legislation into law in April, DeSantis said: “Just think about it, you’re driving home from work, and all of a sudden, you have people out there shutting down a highway, and we worked hard to make sure that didn’t happen in Florida. … They start to do that, [then] there needs to be swift penalties.”
In 2020 , demonstrators marching for racial justice in the aftermath of a white Minneapolis police officer killing George Floyd, a Black man, on occasion temporarily blocked traffic on South Florida expressways. Florida protests were generally nonviolent but occasionally caused some property damage.
DeSantis, who has been appealing to his conservative base as he moves toward his 2022 re-election campaign and a widely expected 2024 candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, championed House Bill 1.
Democrats, who opposed the new law as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s right to peacefully protest, have been harshly critical of what they see as a double standard in reactions.
“Gov. DeSantis and his allies are very clearly applying a politically-driven double standard when it comes to the right to peacefully protest and exercise free speech. Supporting humanity should never be an either-or situation that’s driven by ‘what’s good politics,’ ” state Sen. Shevrin Jones said in a statement Wednesday. Jones is a Democrat who represents parts of southern Broward and northern Miami-Dade counties.
DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, asserted Wednesday in a Twitter post that the political left and news media “love authoritarianism. Therefore, they are FURIOUS that the Governor of Florida didn’t personally drive 500 miles down the state to arrest people for protesting (not rioting) against the communist regime in Cuba.”