Miami Beach Mayor to Travel to Cuba Next Week

In a historic visit, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine plans to travel to Cuba in his official capacity next week, becoming the first head of a Miami-Dade County city to go to the island since the 1959 revolution.

Levine will fly to Cuba to help lead a graduate seminar for Tufts University, which he said asked him to join a dozen students of international affairs. The dates, set some time ago, happened to coincide with President Barack Obama’s upcoming trip to the island, the first time a U.S. president will step on Cuban soil in nearly 90 years.

“I think I’m the first mayor from Miami-Dade County to go,” Levine told the Miami Herald on Tuesday, in a boast that might have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. “I believe in the Cuban people in Cuba as well as the Cuban people in Miami. And I believe that we need to engage people in Cuba, and we need to do it through all types of interaction, and we need to give them hope.

Part of what Levine wants to find out is how Havana might shape up as a tourism destination in competition with Miami Beach.

Another Beach elected official, recently minted Commissioner Ricky Arriola, will accompany Levine on the Tufts trip. Arriola, the Miami-born son of former Miami City Manager Joe Arriola, who was born in Cuba, said he visited the island twice before, including a family trip to Havana last year that included his father.

The younger Arriola, a business executive, called the Tufts trip “exploratory” and called the former U.S. policy of isolating Cuba “a doctrine whose time has passed.”

The fact that two local politicians would proudly announce their visit is a sign of just how rapidly Obama’s opening to Cuba has changed the political dynamic. Still, Levine and Arriola represent a city, which though ethnically diverse — including a large population of Cuban descent — is relatively liberal socially and politically.

Source: The Miami Herald