Just a couple of days before Nov. 3, I drove by Tropical Park in Miami. I stopped at a light for what had to have been two minutes, but it was two minutes that changed my whole outlook on the upcoming election. Prior to this, I had been very keen on staying as far away from the warfare of the election as possible. That changed when I saw my fellow Cuban-Americans assembling in masses in support of President Trump. Nothing new there. I had seen them do it many times before, but there was something different about this time. As I stared from the traffic light, it almost looked like a scene out of communist Cuba, just replace a hammer and sickle for an American flag. The first thought that came to my mind was, “Not four more years of this.”
Many in the country were shocked at the power of the Cuban vote in Florida and expressed discontent at the way the Cuban-American community voted. Although I share that discontent, the results are understandable and the blame does not fall completely on the community.
It is a fact that Cubans are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. This becomes easy to see when a brief history of the modern Democrat party and Cuba are explained. A failed invasion by the Kennedy administration, weak attempts at peace by Carter and Bill Clinton and Elían all have obliterated Cuban trust in the party. Meanwhile, Republicans can bet on their vote, promising toughness towards the Castro regime and making absolutely no change on the island at all.
But, why Trump? Why vote again for a president that barely changed Cuban policy and only rolled back half of Obama’s controversial policy changes? He practically did nothing for them. I blame this on the socialist smear. The Trump campaign was very smart and crafty, using the popularity of socialism in some circles of the Democrat party and Cuban paranoia, to pin Joe Biden as a socialist.
Obviously, Joe Biden is not a socialist. However, the campaign and the President knew the victims of communism would believe it if they pushed it. Just like that, Cubans and some Venezuelans and Nicaraguans adorned their MAGA hats. But, what could be expected of the victims of the hemisphere’s most murderous regimes? It’s a knee-jerk reaction for people who lost whole families to the firing squads. For them, “socialist” is as big of a deal as “Nazi” is for Americans and those who have heard the horrors of the Holocaust.
So, who is to blame? In my opinion, the Biden campaign should have been more proactive to combat the socialist smear and should not have taken its impact so lightly. Democrats may have been able to take Florida if they focused on debunking the socialist mudslinging from Trump.
Now, sadly, as the country seeks to reunite and come together, there is still a population of immigrants as partisan and divisive as their counterparts across the Florida Straits.
