Florida Senator-elect Marco Rubio, New Jersey's Bob Menendez (a Democrat), and the handful of Cuban-Americans in the House all cling to their irrational and failed anti-Castro policies -- including travel restrictions on Americans that don't apply to more legitimate enemies like North Korea.
These positions are emblematic of the Cuban exile community in Miami, a voting bloc whose enormous political heft belies its size. The 838,000 exiles in the Miami area -- less than five percent of Florida's population -- have been a pillar of Republican support in presidential elections since 1980, and over the subsequent years have sent two Cuban-American Republican senators and four Republican congressmen to Washington. (New Jersey is represented in the Senate and House by the Cuban-American Democrats Bob Menendez and Albio Sires, respectively, both of whom typically vote with the Florida Republicans on Cuba issues.) The lawmakers have fought tooth and nail against even the Obama administration's minimal attempts to reform Cuba policy; Menendez threatened to hold the nominations of presidential appointees -- science advisers whose jobs were completely unrelated to Cuba policy -- hostage over Cuba travel concerns. Even modest goodwill gestures, such as cooperation with the Cuban government to provide medical services in post-earthquake Haiti, have drawn letters of protest from the Cuban-American legislators.
Bob Menendez -- a Democrat remember! -- even held up Obama nominees in protest to a mild easing of the travel ban. These Cuban-Americans even celebrate cold-blooded terrorists:
In 1989, [Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen] successfully lobbied President George H.W. Bush to secure the release of -- and amnesty for -- Orlando Bosch, a Cuban exile previously imprisoned in Venezuela for blowing up a Cuban airliner with 73 passengers aboard, including 24 members of the Cuban national fencing team.
Their hatred for Castro has blinded them to the utter failure of the policies they push. A failure spanning decades, even as the US opens up to other communist nations like China and Vietnam.
The founding generation of Cuban émigrés -- exiles like Ros-Lehtinen and her parents -- arrived in Miami traumatized, their lives uprooted and their homes and possessions confiscated. They rarely if ever returned to the island, and in their long absence constructed a nostalgic image of Cuba that bore little resemblance to reality. They looked at the American policy toward Cuba as a means of catharsis and compensation; with their support, the embargo went from being a means of achieving a policy -- the strategic containment of communism -- to a policy goal unto itself.
Undoubtedly. It's therapy masquerading as foreign policy. Same as the GOP tax cut obsession masquerading as fiscal policy. It doesn't work. It has never worked. And it never will work. In fact, just as Bush's tax cuts dug a fiscal hole in the nation's finances that'll take decades to untangle, so has the embargo enabled the Castro regime -- giving it a boogeyman to blame for its own economic failures.
Yet don't pin this idiocy on all Cuban-Americans. Because unlike their politicians, the Cuban-American community is moving on.
Consider the results of a December 2008 poll of Cuban-Americans in Florida's Miami-Dade County conducted by the Institute for Public Opinion Research at Florida International University, which found that 55 percent of the respondents were in favor of lifting the embargo -- the first time a majority had said so since the institute started polling in 1991. A full 65 percent were in favor of the United States both resuming diplomatic relations with Cuba and loosening the additional restrictions placed on travel to and trade with the island by the George W. Bush administration in 2003.
Part of the reason for the shift in public opinion?
What Cubans -- even those who were just as disenchanted with the communist regime as the first-generation exiles -- saw when they looked at Miami was a group fixated on punishing Castro, even if it came at the expense of the Cuban people.
Aside from the foreign policy angle to this, and aside from the fact that I married into a Cuban family, there's another reason I'm interested in this topic:
According to exit polling in the 2008 election by Bendixen & Associates, 84 percent of Cubans in the Miami area over the age of 55 voted for John McCain, a traditional Republican Cuba hawk -- but Barack Obama, the first major presidential candidate with a record of opposition to the embargo, garnered 55 percent of the under-30 vote. This year's election also saw the second serious challenge in as many elections from a Cuban-American politician running in a Florida House race on a platform of engaging with Cuba. Joe Garcia, a former leader of Mas Canosa's Cuban American National Foundation who has reinvented himself as a Cuba policy reformer, got 42 percent of the vote against Cuba-hardliner David Rivera -- a loss, but in an exile-heavy district and an election year that favored Republicans, a hopeful sign for the future.
This is yet another demographic shift that favors Democrats, and can very well alter the balance of power in swing Florida. Democrats are close to cracking the GOP stranglehold on the Cuban-dominated parts of southern Florida. And once they do, the Florida GOP will be in serious trouble. Not only are Cuban-Americans a significant percentage of their overall vote total, but also one of its biggest sources of cash.