An American Son: A Memoir (18 page)

I was sitting at my desk at the firm when I heard the news from a local campaign consultant. One of the most powerful state senators in Florida had just cut a deal with prosecutors who had indicted him for Medicare fraud. He would resign from office that day. At first, the bulletin meant nothing more to me than being a piece of interesting political news that had no bearing on my future. But the consultant who broke the news to me explained that Carlos Valdes, the term-limited state representative whose vacant seat I was considering running for, wanted to remain in the legislature. The most obvious course for him would be to run for the just vacated senate seat in a special election. That meant Valdes’s house seat would be contested in a special election as well. Anyone running for it would have to start their campaign immediately.

I had only hours to decide what to do. Valdes announced for the senate special election, and the election for his house seat was scheduled for the same time. The winner of the special election would be an incumbent running for reelection the following November, which would give him or her a leg up over any opposition. It’s notoriously difficult to beat incumbents in the Florida Legislature. Moreover, the winner of the special election would have a seniority edge in a huge freshman class of legislators. And if I didn’t run in the special election, another opportunity might not be available for years. I had to run now or wait for a very long while.

I discussed it with Jeanette and the firm’s partners. With their blessing, I decided to run. The timing wasn’t ideal, but how often is anything perfectly timed in life? It wasn’t our plan. It was life.

A
T FIRST IT APPEARED THE CAMPAIGN WOULD BE EASIER than I had imagined. None of my rumored opponents were well known or well positioned to run. That changed the morning Angel Zayon, a popular television news reporter and contributor for a highly rated drive-time radio show, announced his candidacy.

I wasn’t too concerned initially. Angel had never run for office before. He hadn’t raised any money and he didn’t have an organization. But David Rivera was worried from the start. He appreciated what I had not. Angel was well known—better known than I was. In a short campaign, greater name recognition would be a huge advantage. I held out hope Angel would change his mind. But when he filed his candidacy and qualified for the ballot, I knew I faced a stiff challenge from a formidable opponent.

It felt odd to campaign during the holiday season, and challenging. People are a little busy at Christmas, and not likely to be preoccupied with politics. I walked door to door as I had done the year before in West Miami. More than once, I approached a house as the owners were putting up their Christmas lights.

My fund-raising head start gave me an advantage. None of the other candidates for the Republican nomination were able to raise as much money as I had. We were better organized, too, and I felt confident on primary day I would win with more than 50 percent of the vote. If I fell short
of 50 percent, a runoff election between the two top vote getters would be held four weeks later.

The early returns suggested I had been overconfident. Angel was doing much better than I had expected. He was winning precincts I had been certain I would win. He was beating me in important precincts in Hialeah and clobbering me in absentee ballots. But he didn’t get 50 percent, and I finished in second place with thirty-nine fewer votes.

We would have a runoff. I thought the night had been a disaster, and I felt pretty certain it would be repeated in the runoff election. With Carlos Lacasa’s help, I had received campaign contributions from the state’s major Republican donors, who had been convinced I would win. Now that Angel had finished first, they would want to hedge their bets and donate to him. He had come out of nowhere to beat me without money or organization. Now he would have both.

I suffered a psychological blow as well. Many supporters and local activists who had helped me jumped ship immediately after the first vote and joined Angel’s campaign. It’s fair to say, a sense of doom gripped my campaign. I had a choice to make. I could feel sorry for myself and give up or I could buckle down, figure out what I had done wrong and fix it.

My first task was to address my underperformance with absentee voters. Angel had aggressively pursued them. He had shown up personally at the homes of voters who had requested absentee ballots, carrying a roll of stamps. He urged them to fill out their ballots for him and mail them that day. I had to match his effort for the runoff, and pressed my family into service. My parents went out together every day to visit absentee voters. Using the daily county election lists, we anticipated when voters would receive their ballots and timed my folks’ visits for the same day. I dispatched my sisters to do the same, and even Jeanette, who was five months’ pregnant at the time, knocked on doors for me.

Next, I had to fix my problem in Hialeah. Although it was only a small part of the district, Hialeah is a politics-obsessed town. Its residents vote in higher numbers than any other place in Miami-Dade. Hialeah’s longtime and powerful mayor, Raul Martinez, supported Angel because he believed I was allied with his rivals. I couldn’t persuade Raul to switch allegiances, so I had to make a virtue out of his opposition. Raul was powerful, but he had many enemies, and I appealed to them for help. All I had to do was tell
them that Raul was supporting Angel, and they were instantly motivated to help me.

None of Raul’s enemies was more helpful to me than Modesto Pérez, known locally as the guy from Mr. Cool Appliances. Modesto was a self-made man who spent his days at the warehouse where he sold water coolers, using his political contacts to help his neighbors. When he agreed to help a candidate, he had a simple expectation in return. If you were elected, and he asked for your help on behalf of people who had come to him for help, you would give it. They were always legitimate requests: a small store owner who wanted to get a lottery ticket terminal, a grandmother who needed a letter of recommendation for her granddaughter’s college application—that kind of thing. It was retail politics at its purest, and Modesto was a master of it.

I had never worked harder than I did during those four weeks. I walked every day from very early in the morning until it was so dark people wouldn’t open their doors. After I finished, my father and I would put up signs until two or three in the morning. I felt certain I had done all I could by primary day, but far from certain it would prove enough to win.

On Election Day we confronted one disappointing development after another. Popular Miami city commissioner Tomas Regalado, who for weeks had assured me of his support, turned up at the polling site at St. Dominic Catholic Church and handed out literature for Angel. From another precinct, where we had lost badly in the first round, one of my most trusted supporters called to say we were likely to lose again. Throughout the day, we received reports that volunteer drivers for Raul Martinez’s political machine were dropping off hundreds of voters at the polls, and I knew they weren’t voting for me.

I had been working a polling station in the largest precinct in Hialeah when I felt the need to retreat to my car, rest for a few minutes and feel sorry for myself. As I sat there, I saw in the fading light my wife—who was then six months’ pregnant, had never liked politics and would have been perfectly happy if I had never run for office—working harder than I was. I watched her approach voters and try to convince them to vote for her husband, who was off somewhere sulking. I thought of Father O’Brien’s homily at our wedding. Love isn’t a feeling, it’s an action. I saw Jeanette’s love in action, and I knew if I lost that night, I would be fine.

After the polls closed, we headed straight to our campaign headquarters at the Fraternal Order of Police hall in Little Havana. By the time we arrived, the results had already started to trickle in. We didn’t have a television or Internet, so a volunteer stationed at the county elections department conveyed them over the phone. I trailed all night long, and was still behind with only one precinct’s returns yet to be counted, St. Dominic’s. But St. Dominic’s was my strongest precinct, and I knew it would put me over the top. A few minutes later I received word over the phone that I had won the precinct easily and the election by a whopping sixty-four votes.

We rushed into the hall and made the announcement to a jubilant crowd of family, friends and supporters. Jeanette sat in a corner apart from the crowd, quietly tearing up with joy. My nephew Danny took a picture of her that I still have. She was happy and proud, and probably unaware how much our lives would be changed by my election.

The general election was still two weeks off, but it was a solidly Republican district, and I won it comfortably. I was twenty-eight years old, and headed to Tallahassee. The legislative session would begin in less than eight weeks, and Jeanette would give birth to our first child four weeks after that.

The firm had been very supportive of my candidacy, and generous with the time they gave me to campaign. But after I won, the partners informed me they were going to reduce my salary by the same amount I would earn as a state legislator. The news stung. I had counted on the extra money to help with the expense of the new baby. This, too, had not been in our plans. But, as I was beginning to learn, you make plans, and then life unmakes them.

W
E AWOKE ON A FEBRUARY MORNING IN 2000 TO FIND A thick fog covering Tallahassee. Jeanette and I, my parents and my sisters and their children had made the eight-hour drive to the state capital the night before in a three-van caravan. After breakfast we loaded everyone into the vans and made a right turn from our hotel onto the Apalachee Parkway, the broad street that leads uphill to the capitol building. The fog had begun to lift and I could see the dome of the Old Capitol and the twenty-two-floor capitol building behind it, where I would be sworn in that morning.

I was sworn in with another new house member from Miami, Renier Diaz de la Portilla, whose brother had vacated his house seat to run in the special senate election. I was allowed to say a few words at the ceremony. I thanked my family and supporters, and closed with a line borrowed from President Kennedy’s inaugural address: “knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

The sixty-day legislative session wouldn’t begin for another three weeks, but lawmakers had returned to the capital for a week of committee work. Half of the members of the house were termed out and would leave the legislature at the end of the session. Some had served there almost as long as I had been alive, and it was clear many of them didn’t want to go. My committee assignments reflected my low status as a new member, and
the reluctance of veteran legislators to share any of their authority before they were required to relinquish it.

Races for speaker of the Florida House usually begin years before the winner assumes the office. As soon as I arrived in Tallahassee I found myself thrust into the middle of the 2004 speaker’s race. Three new representatives from Miami-Dade had been elected in the class of 1998. One of them, Gaston Cantens, a former prosecutor, aspired to be the first Cuban American to serve as speaker of the house beginning in 2004. I was immediately pressured by two members of Gaston’s class to sign a card pledging my support for him. But one of Gaston’s rivals for speaker, Randy Johnson, had been immensely helpful to my campaign. He had helped me raise money and had been at my campaign headquarters during the tense hours when the outcome was in doubt. Gaston had stayed on the sidelines during my campaign, reluctant to risk endorsing the wrong candidate and making an enemy of the winner.

I was greatly indebted to Randy, and the last thing I wanted to do was appear ungrateful by immediately turning my back on him. But Gaston’s election to speaker was a matter of pride to the Cuban American community, and I knew I would have to support him eventually. I held back from making any commitment, and some of Gaston’s supporters misinterpreted my reluctance as a signal that I wanted to be Florida’s first Cuban American speaker. And although that was the furthest thing from my mind at the time, suspicions about my ambitions would persist for quite some time among some of my fellow legislators.