Cuban American outrage is growing following the Florida Cabinet's unanimous votedto designate a $67 million plot of land in downtown Miami to the foundation for President Donald Trump’s presidential library, according to the Washington Post.
The announcement last week that Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and his administration planned to take over a vacant lot on the campus of Miami Dade College — next to the iconic Freedom Tower — to donate for the library drew outrage, especially from Miami's Cuban American community.
Downtown Miami's iconic landmark Freedom Tower, a National Historic Landmark known as the “Ellis Island of the South,” is a beacon for Cuban American immigration and the antithesis of Trump’s mass deportation efforts of late. The land — currently being used as a parking lot — is valued at an estimated $67 million.
The college spent $30 million restoring the 11-story tower built in 1925 by a newspaper publisher as headquarters for the Miami News. In August, “El Refugio” — the refuge, as generations of Cuban Americans call it — reopened as a museum dedicated to the plight of refugees and immigrants.
While the president's youngest son Eric, a trustee for his father's library foundation, celebrated the move, saying on his X account that it will be “It will be the greatest Presidential Library ever built, honoring the greatest President our Nation has ever known," Cuban Americans with connections to the Tower disagree.
“I can’t think of any two narratives that are any more in opposition than the one of the humanity that the Freedom Tower is a symbol for, and then how this president has spoken about immigrants and immigration,” Ana Sofia Pelaez, co-founder and executive director of the Miami Freedom Project, told the Washington Post.
Pelaez, whose mother arrived to America via the Pedro Pan flights that in the 1960s brought in thousands of Cuban children fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro, added that the Tower "is a monument to what that experience was and the help that they received and the support that they received. It is very much about receiving refugees.”
And though nearly 70 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County in Florida voted for Trump, his harsh immigration crackdown has seen the president losing support of what was once his stalwart base, with a recent Politico poll showing his Latino support down 20 percent. This latest move isn't helping.
"It was our lifeline,” said Mercedes Toural, 77, who came to Miami—specifically to the Freedom Tower— with her sister Amelia on a Pedro Pan flight. “It helped us to survive. Now they’re using El Refugio as something political for political games, and I think that is dreadful.”
Toural's sister Amelia agreed, saying, “To put it right next to the building that represents immigrants, that is a symbol for freedom, that is a slap in the face to immigrants.”