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What You Missed This Week in La Gaceta

From As We Heard It, by Patrick Manteiga

► Friends are encouraging Democratic State Senator Darryl Rouson to stay involved in the State Legislature. He is term limited out of his State Senate seat, but his supporters want him to run for State House District 62. So far, only Democrats have announced for that seat. … (to read more, buy a paper)

► The local Democratic Party, under Chair Vanessa Lester, continues to flounder. The latest was complete rejection by a longtime ally – union labor.
Kim Smith, president of the Hillsborough County Democratic Party Labor Caucus and a member of IBEW Local 824 addressed the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee in person and in writing about labor’s disappointment in the local party and that it is cutting the party off.
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
“The Party only reached out to Labor recently, and only because it desperately needs our money. Let me be perfectly clear so there is no confusion: you will not be getting any. The Democratic Party is still not speaking to the needs of working families. With few exceptions (individuals, not the Party itself) you have ignored us. You rarely speak about the issues we care about. You make time for every group under the sun except American workers. You don’t even know what concerns us because you don’t ask. You come to us only when your coffers are empty.
“Even worse are the cowardly anti-union remarks being made behind our backs. In the last month alone, a long-time Party regular told a caucus, ‘the unions have never done anything for us.’ … Now, Party leadership is making eleventh-hour calls to Labor because you’re losing members and going broke. Let me reiterate: we do not care what happens to you. For years, we carried this Party. We were your largest donors. And now we’re told we’ve done nothing for you? The reality is quite the opposite: you’ve done nothing for us. And the final insult came just days ago, when the Chair of the Florida Democratic Party finally contacted unions in a last-ditch attempt to raise funds. Union leaders responded as I warned they would, with honesty and frustration. The Chair and her team left that meeting without even paying their restaurant bill. We don’t forget slights like that.
“We are not putting up with this disrespect any longer. If you think you’re getting union money, if you think we’ll buy tables at your October event or join your new fundraising wing, think again. We will give our time and our resources to candidates and organizations that share our values and respect our work.
“That no longer includes this Party.
“If you manage to survive the mess you’ve created, I hope next time you’ll listen when working people speak through the labor movement. You certainly haven’t listened yet.”
Ouch! …(to read more, buy a paper)

► The Tampa Bay Business Journal ran an interesting article about the reasons Strategic Property Partners (SPP) is building a 12-story parking tower with 675 parking spaces that will be the first building of the second phase of the massive Water Street development.
When Water Street was first being planned, its developers imagined a future where people outnumbered cars in the Water Street area and surrounding urban core. The developers did not want to overbuild parking garages because they felt the ones planned would be unneeded in the future. People would use mass transit, rideshares, bicycles, scooters and take long walks into the district. In 2018, Jeff Vinik, the managing partner of SPP, told media the development would look at flexible parking garages that could easily be converted to residential spaces and other uses as people stop using cars in Downtown.
This new garage is being built because there is inadequate parking capacity in the Water Street district. The future of mass transit and alternative transportation has not manifested in Tampa.
The Water Street developers are wise to make the adjustment now. The City of Tampa should follow suit. … (to read more, buy a paper)

► We wrote last week that the Hillsborough Society was threatening legal action against the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee (HCDEC), Vanessa Lester and others for an e-mail that made it look like the Hillsborough Society no longer existed so the HCDEC could fool Democrats to change their giving from the Hillsborough Society to the HCDEC’s newly created Democracy Builder’s Circle.
The threat worked.
The HCDEC is sending out this e-mail – “On July 13, 2025, you received an email that referred to individuals who donated to the Hillsborough Society in the past as ‘former members.’ This, coupled with a reference to the recently created Democracy Builders’ Circle, may have incorrectly implied that the Hillsborough Society no longer exists. …(to read more, buy a paper)

From Chairman of the Bored, by Gene Siudut

► … And that’s when I discovered the Dickinson work. While it’s a nice piece, I blasted through it quickly. That’s not because I am a speed reader, but because it’s not a book.
It’s a 90-word poem.
I get the outdoorsy/spring theme of the theme of the recommended books, but with the State’s assault on schools, education, etc. I can’t imagine anyone from the State recommending a 19th century transcendentalist , let alone a poem.
I assume someone just started looking up words associated with spring and came up with the title and recommended it without ever knowing it wasn’t a book, nor its content. And for the record, “Green Eggs and Ham,” which has seven times the amount of words of Dickinsons’s poem.
Full disclosure, “Green Eggs and Ham” only has 50 words, Dr. Suess just used the same ones a lot due to a challenge that he could not write a book using only 50 words. …(to read more, buy a paper)

From The Reasonable Standard, by Matt Newton

► Not long ago, the State Legislature unveiled the Live Local Act. It held great promise: an expeditated, administrative process to vest non-residential land (i.e. commercial and industrial) with residential entitlements.
Rather than have real estate developers navigate the lengthy, very expensive, and often-emotional public hearing process, the Legislature empowered them with a cheaper, expedited and administrative option to add residential units to communities.
Many local governments were appalled.
Because here’s the thing: local governments and their elected officials have historically depicted certain land as non-residential on their long-range planning maps for good reason.
For example, urban planners typically cluster commercial land at major intersections to manage traffic and avoid strip commercial development. Many communities encourage adding residential land to these commercial developments through vertical integration—i.e. adding floors of residential use on top of floors of commercial use. …(to read more, buy a paper)

From In Context, by Doris Weatherford

► Elon Musk believes that the federal budget is full of waste, fraud, and abuse because that’s what he sees when he looks in the mirror: he and his billionaire friends routinely rip off the government, so he thinks that poor people do, too. By his standards, it would be only rational: he has had some $38 billion in federal subsidies for his adventures in electric cars, space exploration, and more. I’m not opposed to such innovation, but I am opposed to the pot calling the kettle black. And I’m delighted to see that at least a few of the low-income Musk/Trump disciples are awakening to how they harmed their individual selves by dancing to the tune of deceptive oligarchs.
The point that many of us have missed is that Republicans didn’t (narrowly) win the election because voters agreed with Project 2025: they won because Kamala Harris lost. They won because many people, sadly including some women, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman, especially a woman of color. The deciding Electoral College difference was in the Rust Belt states, where masculinity is threatened by the long-term underemployment that was created by billionaires such as Musk. …(to read more, buy a paper)

From Silhouettes, an interview with Jane Hernandez, by Tiffany Razzano

► As a University of Tampa graduate, one of Jane Hernandez’s greatest passions is the restoration and preservation of the Henry B. Plant Hall on campus.
For the past 16 years, she’s been a member of The Chiselers, an organization that was founded in 1959 and is dedicated to raising funds – hundreds of thousands of dollars each year – to restore the historic building, and now serves as the group’s president.
Plant Hall was initially built between 1888 and 1891 by railroad magnate Henry B. Plant as the Tampa Bay Hotel. Today, it’s home to classrooms, UT administrative offices and the Henry B. Plant Museum, and is a designated National Historic Landmark.
…(to read more, buy a paper)

From Líneas de la memoria, por Gabriel Cartaya

► Cuando supe de la existencia del libro Jose Martí y las flores (2024), no conocía a su autor y, mucho menos, que vivíamos cerca. Un día me llamó por teléfono y entonces supe que Vilfredo Ávalo Viamontes radica en Port Richey, trabaja en Tampa y tiene otro libro –La floriografia martiana (2025)– donde se extiende, sin terminar, su larga investigación sobre este apasionante tema.
Ávalo Viamontes es de Camagüey, Cuba, donde se hizo profesor, historiador e investigador. Desde allí dio a conocer sus primeros escritos acerca de un campo del conocimiento martiano poco conocido, en artículos como “Descripciones botánicas de Martí sobre las flores”, “Aproximación a la visión martiana en torno a la jardinería” y “Las flores en el corpus de la obra martiana”. Posee un doctorado en Ciencias Pedagógicas y se ha desempeñado como docente en universidades de Cuba, Venezuela y Ecuador. También, ha publicado en revistas como Islas (Cuba), Razón y palabra (México), Tendencias pedagógicas (Madrid) e Historia de la Educación Latinoamericana (Colombia).
En las páginas de estos dos libros de Ávalo, como se expresa en la presentación del primero, se afirma su “utilidad para adentrarse en el fascinante mundo de las flores y su relación con la virtud como parte de la ética y la estética martianas”. Con el ánimo de propiciar que esta obra se conozca, y se reconozca al autor, le solicitamos una entrevista que damos a conocer. … (to read more, buy a paper)

From Briznas culturales, por Leonardo Venta

► Ya está próximo el 45.º aniversario luctuoso de Roland Barthes –que falleciera el 26 de marzo de 1980, varias semanas después de ser atropellado por un vehículo en una calle parisina– y he decidido rememorarle con el siguiente humilde y breve trabajo sobre Mitologías (1957), una colección de ensayos que previamente habían aparecido en Les Lettres nouvelles.
Barthes, crítico literario, sociólogo, semiólogo y filósofo francés, fue uno de los intelectuales más relevantes del pasado siglo. Es considerado responsable de aplicar a la crítica literaria las percepciones surgidas del psicoanálisis, la lingüística y el estructuralismo. Estableció conceptos como el “del placer del texto” y de este como “un cuerpo”, así como el de la “muerte del autor”, entre otros. Es igualmente reconocido por articular la teoría y la práctica de la intertextualidad, así como promover el estudio de los signos culturales.
En el campo ideológico, se destaca por su posición desafiante a las normas establecidas y, por consiguiente, a las clases hegemónicas. Uno de sus aportes más relevantes e interesantes al pensamiento moderno es la nueva valoración que ofrece al concepto del mito. …(to read more, buy a paper)