You thought Fidel Castro was dead? Nope, he's rocking the race for Florida governor! (Opinion)

[In It to Win It]

Miami Herald via Yahoo News

Greetings from Florida’s gubernatorial campaign trail, Hialeah edition.

Joining us today, as Democrat Charlie Crist names his lieutenant governor in the “City of Progress,” is the ghost of Fidel Castro.

His youthful, bearded rebel face appears, along with the hammer and sickle, on a mobile electronic billboard — propped up by Republican supporters of Gov. Ron DeSantis outside of Hialeah Middle Community School, where the official announcement is being made.

This is where Karla Hernández-Mats has taught for a decade and where Crist has come to announce the charismatic leader of the Miami-Dade County teachers union as his running mate, affirming that the dismal state of education in Florida will be on the ballot.

The GOP responds with the only trick this elephant knows: insinuating that Crist’s pick is a Castro sympathizer — and so is he.

But it’s remarkable that it took a nanosecond for Team DeSantis to raise from the dead the comandante, after word spread that Crist would reveal his Hialeah-raised, wild-card choice in the largest Cuban city after Havana.

With the nomination of Florida’s 2010 Teacher of the Year, Crist catapults DeSantis’ controversial education policies and his questionable portrayal of teachers as less-than and, worse, “groomers,” to the top of the ballot.

If elected, Crist would have an education insider who embodies what we know the American Dream means in this part of the country.

In Miami-Dade, Republicans couldn’t possibly go an election cycle without throwing their Democratic opponents into a made-up pro-Castro pool. It’s so much easier than having to actually discuss issues, especially policy dooming our children to a lesser education and poorly preparing them for competitive college admissions, issues on which Hernández-Mats can campaign.

If it were not for Fidel, Republicans would have to explain, for example, why lawmakers who get a paycheck from the private education industry have siphoned billions of our tax dollars to their employers — with the blessing of DeSantis and his predecessor, Rick Scott.

They would have to address the teacher brain drain, their flight from the profession and Florida, disgusted with unsafe working conditions, low pay, long hours and ingratitude from the likes of DeSantis.

But Fidel Castro’s ghost serves them well.