Surfside, Cuba and Haiti. A Trilogy for the History Books
Tom Madden, Founder & CEO, TransMedia Group
This past week has been nothing short of historic for the region where we live in perpetual amazement and excitement, ironically under ceaseless, yet often discordant sunshine.
It used to be just the occasional hurricanes that kept our attention and our hearts pounding. Now there are human hurricanes erupting in headlines and images emanating from one of South Florida’s red hot news centers, Miami.
Unrelenting they come, the daily mounting death toll, more victims identified from the now infamous condo collapse in nearby Surfside, which is not that far from the 22-story oceanfront twin condo towers where Rita and I live, The Chalfonte in Boca Raton.
News about our chivalrous Chalfonte keeps breaking in newspapers and on television as our having emerged as a leader in proactively evaluating our structural soundness in an even more rigorous way than that decreed by the typical 40-year reinspection mandates, that is if there were one required in Palm Beach County, but there isn’t. So may the best condo win . . . survival!
Now, thanks to our courageous board of directors, we’re all sleeping more soundly knowing our condo is way ahead of the safety curve in keeping the salt where it belongs in the ocean, not in our steel underpinnings, weakening our foundation.
Next came the catastrophic assassination of the President of Haiti by a small army of thugs, plotters and insurrectionists based where else, but in Miami.
And then after that another Cuban crisis rears its angry head as the population there protests en masse against the communist regime still so ineptly in power, making their lives miserable.
Yes, history-in-the-making keeps swirling around Miami and now not just from the collapse of the Champlain Towers South in Surfside.
Cuban-Americans in Miami root for their brothers, sisters and cousins just 90 miles away as they fearlessly crowd into streets across that upset island, loudly expressing how fed up they are with lacking the basics, now without even shots of the protective COVID vaccines, due to the regime’s repression.
Where do their cries, their demands, resonate the most? Why of course, Miami.
There the din of disorder complicates the response in Florida when, as Miami Herald editorial page editor Nancy Acrun puts it, “the Marxist wing of Black Lives Matter shamefully voices support for a brutal regime” . . . where South Florida law enforcement looks the other way when Cuban-American marchers shut down expressways, almost as if in defiance of the governor’s recent anti-riot law.
Yet isn’t it heroic how successive generations in this community are so passionate about keeping the fervor for freedom alive and well? We salute you, amigos!
It’s no less the case for Haitian Americans in South Florida, whose hearts beat in sync with those of their families and compatriots on that beleaguered homeland of their parents and grandparents, Haiti.
The assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse threatens to sink that nation into even deeper chaos and despair than the normal turmoil it was in already.
Maybe now we need just a tiny tropical storm, please mother nature, to take our minds off all these scary headlines and the chaos that surrounds us during this one long historic summer.
About the Author: Besides an inveterate blogger, Tom Madden is an author of countless published articles and five books, including his latest, WORDSHINE MAN, available this summer on Amazon. He is the founder and CEO of TransMedia Group, an award-winning public relations firm serving clients worldwide since 1981 and has conducted remarkably successful media campaigns and crisis management for America’s largest companies and organizations.
