Carmen Yulín Cruz, the radical separatist Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, made yet another appearance on Univision’s Sunday political affairs show Al Punto.
Watch as Cruz, national co-chair for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, minimizes host Jorge Ramos’ recent arbitrary detention in Venezuela while attempting to dance around her failure to denounce the brutal dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela:
JORGE RAMOS: I don’t understand, really, in all honesty…
CARMEN YULÍN CRUZ, MAYOR OF SAN JUAN (D): No, I know, I know…
RAMOS: I don’t understand why you don’t want to criticize Cuba or Venezuela when we broadly know that (we’re talking about) two dictatorships where human rights are violated, where there are political prisoners, where there is no freedom of the press.
CRUZ: There were political prisoners...the last political prisoner from Puerto Rico was released on January 17th, 2017.
RAMOS: Of course, OK, so I know that you don’t want political prisoners in Puerto Rico, But can you say the same, then, that you don’t want political prisoners in Cuba or Venezuela.
CRUZ: I can tell you the following: as long as Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, my efforts will totally be directed towards the elimination of poverty in Puerto Rico, where 1.3 million people need nutritional assistance in order to put food on the table…
RAMOS: I get what you’re saying but wanted to see how far you wanted to go there, and I understand that that’s the limit, right?
CRUZ: ...that’s where all my energy is, and look, one of the things that the Vatican asked for and that (UNHCHR) Michelle Bachelet asked for is for conversation and not confrontation, and I understand that you had a personal experience…
RAMOS: Yes, (it was) complicated, to say the least…
CRUZ: Complicated, to say the least...we in Puerto Rico endure that complicated experience on a daily basis as a colony of the United States.
RAMOS: We’ll end on that note.
CRUZ: We’ll end on that note.
First of all, it is painfully clear that there are limits to Jorge Ramos’ “contrapoder (opposite of power)” gimmick, and that Ramos is really only interested in standing opposite of power he doesn’t like. We’ve seen recent examples of that, for example, with his overly deferential coverage of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ramos’ coverage of Cruz is no different, going back to his enabling embrace of the mayor’s media showboating in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria; equal parts anti-Trumpism and dead-end separatism.
That, incidentally, is the shortest answer as to why Cruz won’t denounce Cuba and Venezuela- doing so would risk aggrieving a key component of her political coalition...left-wing separatists who see in Cruz a champion that would bring the island closer to independence under the Castro-Maduro axis.
In 2019, things are different in the sense that Mayor Cruz is not scouring the U.S. mainland for headlines and free media as frequently as she did in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, but is campaigning both as a candidate for Governor of Puerto Rico and as a national co-chair for the Bernie Sanders campaign. But mentions of the latter always seem to be missing from recent interviews of Cruz. Here Cruz is presented to Univision’s viewers as someone who supports Bernie Sanders, but there is no mention whatsoever of her role within the campaign.
As we saw in the video above, Cruz refuses to answer any questions pertaining to socialism, Cuba, or Venezuela. If Ramos is truly vexed by this refusal, he could have easily avoided this with a minimal vetting of Cruz before giving her a platform and elevating her on the national stage. As we warned early on:
Once again, the liberal media has vetted its champion incredibly poorly. And so it is that the Puerto Rican face of the #Resistance is a radical leftist separatist who championed a terrorist and is largely loathed by her own constituents.
Perhaps there is no greater takeaway from the interview than Cruz' inadvertent admission of the toxicity of socialism within the Hispanic community- which viewers can infer from the refusal of a socialist, acting in the role of spokesperson for another socialist, to embrace the term and identify as such.
One wonders what went through Ramos’ mind as his guest breezily minimized his harrowing detention at the hands of the Maduro narcodictatorship and flippantly compared political prisoners languishing in SEBIN dungeons to convicted FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera. Given the information that Ramos bypassed on the way to elevating Cruz, it is clear that these vexations are self-inflicted.
