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crespo-versailles

Photo by Al Crespo

Sometimes I wish I could be at several places at one time. On election night, as many of you know, I was at the Miami-Dade Democratic Party victory celebration at Parrot Jungle.

Meanwhile, one of my photojournalist friends, Al Crespo, was at Versailles restaurant, which anyone familiar with Miami can tell you, is Ground Zero for right-wing Cuban-American politics.

I find it one of the most exciting places to take pictures, even if I was once assaulted by a Cuban-American senior citizen as I was video-taping a protest.

This is how Crespo describes election night:

From a side street, Jesus Rodriguez, with an Obama poster, climbed onto a newsbox and held his poster high for all to see. It was an act of defiance as much as it was a political statement.

The McCain supporters didn’t know what to do. At first they made some feeble attempts to use their signs in an attempt to block photographers from taking photos of Rodriguez, but soon turned their focus to the street, where cars were beginning to pass with people holding out Obama signs. A few McCain supporters attempted to rip the signs out of the hands of the people in the cars, but soon gave up.

Then a man with a Confederate flag came running onto the scene, something I’ve never seen in the hundreds of times I’ve been to Versailles.

Read all about it on Crespo’s website:

And check out the following video from Univision via South Florida Daily Blog. It’s in Spanish, but basically the two Cubans interviewed are saying what we all are saying, that we needed a change.