In 2016, the majority of Cuban-Americans supported a candidate that made anti-immigration a cornerstone of his campaign — a choice that is difficult to reconcile with the behavior of other Latino voters.
Exit polls for the greater Cuban-American population in Florida, for example, indicate that a disproportionate amount of Cuban-Americans supported Trump compared to other Latino groups. While 54 percent of Cuban-Americans supported Trump, only 35 percent of Latinos nationwide did. Similarly, in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election, Republican Ron DeSantis won twice as many Cuban-American votes as his Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum. A nearly identical percentage of Cuban-Americans also chose current Republican Gov. Rick Scott over Democrat Bill Nelson in the Florida senate race. The Cuban vote was solidly red in 2016 and 2018 despite the trend of Latino voters being reliably blue.
Even more surprising is that, until 2016, Cuban-Americans had been voting increasingly more Democratic. Why did the Cuban-American vote break away from a solid trend and veer back into the territory of the solid GOP? The unique history of Cuban-Americans, particularly their overall negative experience with socialism, provides the answer.
The flow of Cuban immigrants began in 1959 at the conclusion of the Cuban Revolution. When dissidents and political opponents fled the Castro regime, the United States used boat lifts and airlifts to assist those it had labeled as refugees of a socialist regime. Prior to this, the treatment in Cuba, as described by many of the refugees who escaped the island, included suppression of free expression, freedom of association, and free speech. The regime was confirmed to have executed at least 9,240 individuals — including citizens associated with the previous Bautista government — and has continued to suppress any sort of criticism of the regime.
In response to the continuing human rights violations, from 1995 to 2017, Cubans fleeing the regime of Castro were permitted to stay in the United States if they were able to make it to land in America. The result of this policy — known as “wet foot, dry foot” — was that, in comparison to immigration from other nations, Cuban immigrants were disproportionately granted lawful permanent residency status as refugees. This integration into the list of potential voters has raised Cuban-American voters into a position of prominence that has resulted in vying for their votes.
One of the most obvious reasons that pundits have pointed out for Cuban-American support for the GOP in both 2016 and 2018 is the GOP’s characterization of Democratic candidates as far-left, extreme socialists. In the 2018 election, Gillum’s campaign was attacked by DeSantis for proposing allegedly socialist policies such as higher taxes. These strategies are particularly effective at gaining support from older Cuban-Americans who have an aversion to any socialist or communist candidate due to their firsthand experiences with the worst of Castro’s regime.
This same anti-communist sentiment has pitted many Cuban-Americans against Democrats following Obama’s thawing of relations with Cuba. Many Cuban-Americans see the Democratic party as a poisoned well which has tacitly supported a dictatorship in Cuba. This perceived Democratic stance is juxtaposed by the GOP’s stance against the Cuban regime during the election cycles. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was uncertain on its stance toward Cuban relations for much of the election cycle, but it ultimately espoused a hardline stance against the Cuban regime. While his actual policies kept in place many of the cooperative policies of the Obama administration, Trump promised to cancel “the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba.” In taking a public stance against normalized Cuban relations, the GOP has positioned itself to garner Cuban-American support. GOP characterizations of Democratic candidates as sympathetic to communism and socialism have proven effective, but Democratic policies have also been cited as reasons that Cuban-Americans refuse to vote Democratic.
A cursory analysis would seem to show that the 2016 and 2018 election results demonstrate a sudden reversal of Cuban-American voters’ decades-long shift toward voting Democratic. However, an analysis in the context of voting patterns within the Cuban-American demographic shows a different trend. The 2016 and 2018 results may be the by-product of a generation of Cuban-Americans that will lose their electoral power to younger voters in the near future. These reliably red Cuban immigrants came to America before 1980 and witnessed the worst years of the Castro regime. They were naturalized easily thanks to the “wet foot, dry foot” policy and they currently make up a large portion of Cuban voters. However, these voters are older than the average American, and the younger Cuban-Americans have shown that they do not hold the same beliefs as their parents and grandparents and are more likely to be wary of conservative politics: Cuban-Americans under 50 consistently vote blue, as they did in 2012.
Until now, the GOP has held onto the majority of the Cuban vote by appealing to anti-socialist and anti-communist sentiments of the first wave of Cuban immigrants. Yet, as constituents with these opinions age and Cuban-Americans care less about these ideologies, the GOP will struggle to retain the Cuban-American vote.
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