Giving yet another indication that he is not a serious candidate for the Miami-Dade mayor’s seat, Alex Otaola, an activist, actor and podcaster with a penchant for the outrageous and a large Cuban-American following, chickened out of a meet-and-greet forum Monday that he had previously agreed to.
Otaola told the president of the Kendall Federation of Homeowners Associations Monday morning that he was too busy. Apparently, he is too busy for a telephone interview with Ladra because Diana, his handler, also cancelled Political Cortadito’s appointment with Otaola that we had for Wednesday.
It’s understandable. Otaola doesn’t want to answer questions about his blackface performance, visits to Cuba, outrageous comments about Chinese and Puerto Ricans and the commissions he promises to establish to root out communists in our government and business community.
“My campaign will be unlike any other political campaign because I will offer the voter a hardline against those who would impose their socialist, communist agenda on our people,” Otaola says in a kick-off video when he announced his campaign last year. It’s been seen 1,800 times.
Ladra has news for you Mr. Otaola: That’s not unique at all.
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“Those who seek to abolish our freedoms are not just misguided or well-meaning, elitist liberals, but seek to move us from being a democratic Republic to full-blown Cuban-style authoritarian communism,” Otaola says in the video.
He won’t identify the elitist liberals who would impose a socialist or communist agenda on us. That’s not new either.
What is sorta different are the “commissions” Otaola proposes to install, but that’s not exactly new either because it sounds a lot like the McCarthyism U.S. Senate subcommittee hearings from the 1950s. These commissions — and there’s no information on who would comprise them — would “identify the penetration of communism in our county,” and also ask for “investigations on the business that could be laundering money in Miami-Dade for the dictatorships,” Otaola told Jim DeFede in an interview June 23 on CBS4 Miami.
“There are different reports in different channels that there are Chavistas found in the government of Doral,” Otaola went on to say, referring to Venezuelan government supporters. “I don’t believe the communists are in the county government, but I do believe they have deployed influencers and have opened businesses that launder money for the dictatorship in our city and our county.”
Doral Mayor Christi Fraga has gone on several media interviews to say those are baseless allegations and Telemundo has apparently retracted some segments they had broadcast on a supposed connection that doesn’t really exist between the parent of a city employee and the Cuban dictatorship.
Last year, he was sued for defamation and libel for connecting political consultant and Absentee Ballot Queen Sasha Tirador to the communist Cuban regime. That case is still open. In April, a judge dismissed a stalking case against Otaola filed by private investigator Joe Carillo, who had served him on his property, and who said that the podcaster had also called him a communist on his show.
Are these the people he would root out? Ladra spoke to Diana, his handler, several times in the week plus since the interview. Otaola, who is often accompanied by bodyguards, has never called back.
For the CBS4 interview, Otaola took a translator, and not a very good one at that. Anyone who speaks both English and Spanish could tell that the guy wasn’t translating exactly what Otaola said. So, Ladra has done her own translating. The candidate can read and write in English — he did okay with a teleprompter in his campaign kick-off video. But he said he wants to campaign in Spanish “to make sure that my message is conveyed properly, with no mistakes or misunderstandings due to pronunciations.”
Is that the same way he would run the county? He says yes. He will use a translator. Just like he’ll use a translator to speak with residents who only speak Haitian Creole or, say, Russian. “You don’t have to know English to run for mayor,” he said on Tuesday’s Spanish-language podcast. “English is not the official language.”
Otaola likes to say his campaign “pretends to do things differently.” Yeah, it pretends a lot of things.
In fact, Otaola told Jim DeFede — when trying to excuse his blackface performance in one of his podcasts — that he was trained as an actor in Cuba, which might explain why his candidacy seems like one big performance.
“That is one of the greatest mistakes I have committed. I have publicly apologized for that,” Otaola said about the outrageous blackface bit, in which he was fighting with a rapper called Chocolate MC. But then Otaola went on to justify it, anyway.
“In acting in Cuba, and I am trained as an actor, there is such a thing as vernacular theater,” he said, referring to a Cuban style of acting that was used in the 1800s and early 1900s. “Vernacular theater interprets people of color, like Chinese or African descendants, by their [physical] characteristics… and at the time I was not aware of how offensive that could be for the African American community.”
At the time, he had been in the country for about 12 years, DeFede pointed out. “But I had no communications with that community. I did not have the knowledge of what could be disrespectful.”
So, in 2017, he did not know that blackface was a no-no? Probably, because he keeps on justifying it: “However,” he said on the Facing South Florida show, “that was during Halloween and I was impersonating this artist, and nobody was offended by the masks that they sold of Obama.”
Um, not the same thing.
Then there was the time he said that Puerto Ricans didn’t provide anything to their “colonizers” and all they had was “people on food stamps.” He said he apologized to the Puerto Rican community also. Guess he didn’t know that would be offensive, either.
Is he going to apologize tomorrow for saying that there were probably 25 Chinese people in that rocket that exploded Sunday? “Because Chinese people are so small,” Otaola said on Tuesday’s podcast.
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His candidacy would be a joke, except for the fact that thousands of people might actually vote for him. Like toda Hialeah. He is a local, mini Donald Trump who doesn’t really offer anything except GOP red meat, and has a cult-like following. He could really take votes away mostly from Miami Lakes Mayor Manny Cid, who should be the front-running Republican in this nonpartisan race.
Otaola has 645,000 subscribers to his 12-year-old YouTube channel, Cubanos Por El Mundo, and 362,000 subscribers on his live channel, on which he broadcasts his profanity-laden ¡Hola Ota-ola! podcast. He mostly talks about musicians and their personal lives (almost always if not always insulting them and their fans) as well as Cuban politics, and regularly airs clips of Cuban’s current regime leader, Mario Diaz-Canel, and other government officials. Giving them Miami air time they don’t deserve.
He also has a fierce following of fans promoting and defending him on social media, where he has more than 70,000 followers on the platform formerly known as twitter — same as La Alcaldesa. They don’t make a ton of sense, like him. But they are very loyal. (Cid, fyi, has less than 2,500 followers).
Otaola, who loaned his campaign $20,000, has also managed to raise $244,055 more in 9,760 individual contributions — some for as little as $1 — from all over the country, probably with his anti-woke, anti-communism agenda. It’s a good nut for a first-time candidate.
But he might be downright dangerous, and not just because of his hard right rhetoric.
DeFede said some people might consider Otaola a hypocrite. He’s a walking contradiction. And that makes it hard to have confidence in anything he says.
The guy might talk a good anti-communist game, and he does increase awareness of political prisoners and people assassinated by the Cuban regime. He’s funny, sometimes, if vulgar, and Ladra enjoys it when he pokes at Cuban apologists on his show.
But he’s also hard on Cubans who get money sent to them from relatives in Miami and regularly features Cuban government “leaders” on his podcast. He has been to Cuba 11 times, enjoying it like a VIP, and sounds like a Cuban regime plant sent here to make the Cuban community look extreme and racist, like we already know they often do.
On his own show, Otaola talks loudly and dramatically and makes very long-winded speeches. He seems to love the sound of his voice, and has an air that reminds Ladra of the other bearded Cuban who made long-winded speeches and loved the sound of his own voice. And, strikingly, Otaola’s language reflects that of the very infiltrados he wants to target and root out.
In the 24-minute two-on-one with DeFede he said, “My intention as mayor of Miami-Dade is not to permit communists to penetrate Miami as they have intended after the victory of Fidel Castro.”
Whoa! ¿Que que? Victory? Victory of Fidel Castro? I don’t know many exiles who would use that word to describe the take over of Havana by Castro’s thugs. Like “triunfo de la revolución,” “victory” is a word used by regime sympathizers, at least in that context. “El disastre,” is what exiles would say.
By the way, his interpreter actually said the word “triumph,” in the translation on the televised show. Watch it here.
He said he switched to Republican after he saw Jill Biden visit Cuba, and “from that moment on I realized that I was militando en el partido equivocado,” which translates to “militating in the wrong party.” Militating? That’s another ñángaro word.
Then, while he says that certain musicians who live in Cuba and “support the Cuban regime,” like Los Van Van, should not come perform in Miami, DeFede showed video footage of him in Cuba at a Los Van Van concert. He seemed like a VIP in the audience. The singer recognized him and said hello from the stage. Otaola sort of bowed to him in deference.
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“It’s not hypocrisy,” Otaola said defensively. “I was there doing a job for the television channel I worked for, following their editorial line. I was not a political activist,” Otaola says. So, his job was to bow in deference? He also insists he is not against remittances to Cubans from relatives in Miami. “I am in favor of families helping families. What I am against is feeding the …repression, people going as tourists to the hotels of the dictatorship in Cuba are financing the repression.”
On his podcast, however — which he uses to promote his candIdacy and attack incumbent Mayor Daniella Levine Cava — he demonizes families on the island who get remittances. And the footage of him is at a Cuban government venue.
It was also apparently okay for him to get a haircut in Havana and say he preferred it to a Miami barber shop, right? “It just seems like your actions don’t match your rhetoric,” DeFede told him.
“I went to Cuba for the channel I worked for and they gave me a list of artists to interview and businesses to promote. And that’s what I did. I did my job,” Otaola said, somewhat unconvincingly.
He has said in other interviews that he went to Cuba to interview the son of the late singer Juan Formel for Mega TV in Miami, where he was one of the hosts of the show Paparazzi TV, from which he was fired in 2015 after he lost control and fought with another host on air.
Ladra hasn’t been able to find the interview of Samuel Formel online.
Otaola, 45, who was 25 when he came from Cuba in 2003, can certainly blame his language on the indoctrination that he grew up in. But not the comfort he felt “reporting” from Cuba out in the open.
And he has had a bunch of politicians on his podcast show: Maria Elvira Salazar, Marco Rubio, Carlos Gimenez, Mario Diaz-Balart — but none of them have endorsed him, DeFede said, and asked why.
“You would have to ask them, but I am not looking for the endorsements of politicians,” Otaola responded. “I don’t need the recognition of politicians to run this campaign. My intention is to get to the mayoral office differently than how the establishment has done it until now.
“They have the right to endorse who they want. That is not my objective or my aspiration. I don’t need the recognition of the politicians to run this campaign,” Otaola told DeFede.
He doesn’t need endorsements. He doesn’t need to do forums. He doesn’t need to speak English. He doesn’t need to present a platform other than the anti-communist commissions, saying that he will after he’s elected.
He really doesn’t need to be mayor.
Mayoral wannabe Alex Otaola wants to bring McCarthyism to Miami-Dade added by Ladra on
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