Joe Garcia enters the District 25 race

Former Miami-Dade Democratic Chairman and (now) former Obama Administration Energy Department official is making another run for Congress in Miami-Dade’s District 25. He lost to incumbent Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart by a 53-47 margin in 2008, but District 25 is an open seat following Rep. Diaz-Balart’s decision to run in an adjacent district.

Garcia’s announcement speech, on YouTube, is here.

The Republican candidate is likely to be David Rivera, a well-funded incumbent state legislator.

The Herald’s political blog, Naked Politics, has lots more. My earlier thoughts on the race here.

Odds and ends

• Florida State Representative David Rivera raised $700,000 in the first quarter of this year for his Congressional race, according to this blogger at Florida’s Sunshine State News. Rivera is seeking the GOP nomination in the district being vacated by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart. Rivera, meanwhile, is taking a symbolic shot at food exports to Cuba by pushing a bill that will bar the state from putting certificates on Florida food exports to Cuba that verify their Florida origin. The Herald reports that last year’s Florida exports consisted of “ham croquettes, Italian bread crumbs, salad dressing and vegetarian tamales.”

• Herald: Adrian Leiva, a dissident who left Cuba in 2005, died of drowning when attempting to return to Cuba last month in a small boat. His intention was apparently to take up residence in Cuba again and to resume his activism. The three others on his small boat survived.

• A summary of a Council of the Americas seminar on investment conditions in Cuba, and the Council’s Chris Sabatini outlines recommendations for the Obama Latin America policy here, including this:

“Third, shake up the Cuba debate. Take both sides: talk human rights and open up to the island. And don’t wait for reciprocal action on the other side of the Florida straits. The Cuban government wants us to hesitate. Don’t. We should do it because we stand for principle: human rights and openness.”