America's Cuban Shift

When Sen. Marco ­Rubio stands before Miami’s historic Freedom Tower on Monday and announces that he is the second Cuban American to join the 2016 race for president of the United States, Gabriel Perez, Emilio Izquierdo and Mike Valdes will share a powerful sense of pride. This is the big sign that Cuban Americans have finally made it, they all say — accepted not only as refugees from communism or as successful businesspeople but as serious contenders for the most American job in the land.

But let the wave of pride surrounding the candidacies of Florida’s Rubio and fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas subside, and Perez, Izquierdo, Valdes and many of their fellow Cuban Americans find themselves in surprising discord.

The idea of the Cuban American monolith, the notion that the estimated 2 million immigrants and their offspring constitute a single-issue ramrod that for a half-century has forced Washington into a hard line against the Castro brothers’ regime, is crumbling in the classic, perhaps inevitable, way: Time is turning immigrants into Americans.

“Over the last 15 years, and especially the last five years, the Cuban American community has undergone a major transformation,” said Fernando Amandi, whose research firm, Bendixen & Amandi International, regularly polls Cuban Americans. “In the most politicized Hispanic group in the country, there is now a cleavage in which the second and third generations, as well as more recent arrivals from Cuba, do not share the hard-line views and staunchly Republican affinity of the historic exile generation.”

President Obama handily won the vote of Cuban Americans between ages 18 and 50 in both of his elections, according to Amandi’s surveys. His recent research shows that Rubio and Cruz are not necessarily favorite sons at the ballot box. Rubio, who opposes easing the U.S. embargo against Cuba, “is literally advocating for policies that separate the more recent arrivals from their families who are still on the island,” Amandi said.

On the streets of Miami, the palpable pride in Rubio, Cruz and the other Cuban American senator, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), even though he is under indictment on federal corruption charges, does not automatically translate into votes.

“Rubio, he’s not going anywhere,” said Perez, a retired mechanic at Miami’s airport who fled Cuba in 1961 and long ago concluded that stiff-arming the communist regime in Havana never had a prayer of working. “This thing Obama’s doing now, doing business with Cuba again, if America did it 40 years ago, Castro would have been gone.”

Perez points at the others at Domino Park in Miami’s Little Havana, many of them Cuban octogenarians trading quips over the clatter of domino tiles on a dozen outdoor tables. “Rubio is like the old guys here who can’t stop fighting,” Perez said. “They try the same idea for 40 years, and it never works and they just keep fighting.”

Twenty blocks down Little Havana’s main drag, Calle Ocho, Izquierdo, a 67-year-old limo driver who runs a Cuban patriots group on the side, develops a catch in his throat as he talks about two sons of exiles like himself now running for president.

“Two million Cubans and two possible presidents,” he said. “I’m very emotional about it.” Rubio doesn’t have his vote wrapped up yet, but the fact that he is Cuban weighs heavily in his favor. “This says we are a powerful community. And yes, emotion plays a role: Spaniards go by opinions and Anglos go by facts; we Cubans are a hybrid of the two.”

The defining moments in Izquierdo’s life came in Cuba, and his politics in the United States consistently reflect that. “I was 11 when Castro took the power,” he said. “I was 14 when Castro took my family’s property.” He fled in the Mariel boatlift emigration in 1980 and became a U.S. citizen six years later. What he wants from a presidential candidate now is the right answer to one question: “Are you going to represent the Cuban exiles? Because we don’t believe in relations with communists.”

Seventeen miles away, in the upper-middle-class suburb of Miami Lakes — a generation ago an Anglo enclave and now a mostly Cuban community — Mike Val­des, 38, owns Moda, a high-end boutique in which Spanish is used as the main language. The Rubio and Cruz candidacies “put us on the map, finally for something other than Castro, rum or Cohibas,” he said, referring to the brand of cigars.

But relations with Cuba don’t make Valdes’s political top-10 list. “There’s a lot of problems in this country,” he said. “We need to do for us before we start doing for other places.” Valdes remains a Republican because that’s how he was brought up, but he’s okay with Obama’s outreach to Cuba and looks forward to normalized trade and travel.

“Our grandparents’ generation is passing on, and my generation doesn’t really know their stories,” Valdes said. “Our Cuban part is there when you need it, but we’re losing the accents and the language. Soon, the Cubans will just be Miamians. Eventually, they’ll knock down the Freedom Tower and nobody will remember what it meant.”