On Monday, Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted three photos of a man he said was canvassing for him when he was violently attacked by “4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood” in Hialeah, FL, a suburb of Miami (and a Republican stronghold). The photos showed the man wearing a Marco Rubio t-shirt with wounds to the face being loaded into an ambulance.
Anti-fascist sleuths and later the Miami New Times identified the man as Christopher Monzon, aka Chris Cedeno, aka the “Cuban Confederate,”, a former member of the white nationalist group Florida League of the South who also served as the vice president of the Miami Springs Republican Club.
By Monday afternoon, the police report and Rubio's office were telling a different story.
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According to the police report from the Hialeah Police Department, Miami New Times reports that Javier Jesus Lopez, 25, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. There was no mention of politics being a part of the attack in the police report, or that Monzon was attacked because he’s a Republican. No mention of other assailants, just Lopez. When Sgt. Jose Torres, a Hialeah Police Department spokesperson, was asked about the attacker’s motivation, Torres replied that the agency would “allow the investigation to reveal that.” He stopped short of indicating evidence of a hate crime, as Rubio and other Republicans were quick to suggest, saying instead that there is “no indication that is the case” as of this writing.
A local Florida attorney, Daniel Uhlfelder, wrote on Twitter: “Man accused of attacking Rubio staffer, but police account differs from senator’s.”
Monzon, who once ran for city council in Hialeah, gave an interview in 2021 claiming that he had resigned from the white supremacist group League of the South in 2018, but then defended the organization.
“I never belonged to an explicitly white nationalist organization. At the time that I belonged to the League of the South, they did not declare themselves to be a quote-unquote white nationalist organization,” Monzon told the Daily Dot.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the League of the South is a “neo-Confederate” hate group with a long and documented history of racist and antisemitic behaviors.
Jack a Kershaw, a board member in 1998, reportedly once said, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Monzon was arrested in 2017 for using a Confederate flag to fight against protesters rallying against a Confederate street-naming event. Monzon allegedly engaged in a verbal altercation with the demonstrators, shouting that they were “a cancer on the face of the earth! All Jews are!”
Monzon was also present at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
For their part, Rubio's office slightly changed their tune, saying Monzon was canvassing for the Republican Party of Florida—not for Rubio himself. They refused to tell the Miami Herald where the senator's staff got that information.