As my old friend (and John Kerry's) Dan Payne advised Kerry yesterday through his column in the Boston Globe:

Never forget: Florida is still dictatorship run by President Bush's brother Uday.

Florida is a magnet for a certain kind of Latin American oligarch: the kind who come fleeing democracy (Bolivia's disgraced president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada is a recent example, neo-Hatian dictator Gerard Latortue who took refuge there for years before his US-installed return is another) instead of those many good immigrants who come to the U.S. from many lands hoping to practice it.

The South Florida oligarch community attracts elites from Latin America. They come not in search of honest work and opportunity, but, rather, in search of avoiding work and the opportunity to work. These are elites so accustomed to live unfairly off the labor and resources of the many that they have come to believe it as their divine right.

There are, most evidently, other Venezuelans in the United States who don't agree with this crowd of cretinous spoiled brats: they belong to the Bolivarian Circles inside the United States from New York to California. But any of the few pro-democracy Venezuelans that have the bad luck to be living in South Florida probably have to keep quiet about their views because the sea of former and aspiring oligarchs will at best shun them and at worst harm them, in business, in their children's experience at school, and in all the ways that metaphorical lynch mob mentalities form against those who speak uncomfortable truths inside insular communities. In any case, those who can move to other regions flee these crazies, and those who can't are a distinct minority in South Florida even though they are a distinct majority almost anywhere else in the United States.

I repeat, again: I think we must be careful when looking at "the Latino vote," or at any specific nationality within it, to refrain from making generalizations until we've studied the situation. There is no "Latino vote" in the United States in the way the case can be made that there is a "black vote." Latin America has not provided a shared cultural experience in the way that being black in the United States has experienced. Latin America is a continent and isthmus of different lands with very different experiences, and, almost everywhere, two different classes with an abyss of experience between them: the oligarchs on one side and the workers and poor on the other.

Finally, and this is the saddest part of the story: Venezuela Analysis' statement that "South Florida's Hispanic population seems to have placed its votes up for grabs; the candidate with the firmest stance on Cuba and Venezuela is likely to acquire its support," I fear, falls for the same hype that Kerry has fallen for, hook, line, and sinker. The oligarch vote in South Florida is not up for grabs. It is simply, with full complicity of its Republican Party political bosses there and in Washington DC, and the same "organizations" that cheered the kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez, and that get significant perques and funding from Governor Uday Bush, and significant immigration breaks from President Saddam Bush, is dancing a very cynically choreographed recital. It has tricked Kerry, and apparently others, into thinking it is up for grabs in order to neutralize the pro-democracy position visavis Venezuela inside the United States.

Kerry may fall for it, but I don't. That vote is not "up for grabs." It is going to Bush. And I have to admit that, as an armchair political strategist, I grudgingly admire their political smarts, although I hate and oppose their evil, anti-democracy, intent, in having so successfully tricked Kerry and others simply by claiming that their votes are in the air. They're not... Not in South Florida.

It's stuff like this that makes most of Latin America's population correct when it views gringos as kind of slow, fatheaded, and stupid. I mean, if the "opposition candidate" in the U.S. falls for this ploy, stupid is the obvious word to describe him.

The way to turn it around begins with not accepting the premise that the oligarchs and their political bosses have skillfully imposed: they are not "up for grabs." They are, to any conscientious pro-democracy person in any land, the enemy.