Will Little Havana Go Blue?

It used to be enough for politicians to fly in from Washington, talk tough about Castro and count on the support of Cuban Miami. Things are different now. Republicans have counted on the Cuban-American vote for decades, but the Cuban exile community of South Florida is changing, just in time for the election.

By DAVID RIEFF

On the surface, political life in Cuban Miami seems unchanged. Little Havana is still partly a Disney version of a displaced Cuba and partly a genuine community hub, where families who have long since left for suburbia still come for nostalgic weekend lunches. At the Versailles Restaurant, the community newspapers preaching no compromise with Castro are all that are on offer. For almost four decades, the Versailles has been an obligatory stop for Washington politicians courting the Cuban-American community, visits that, as photographs in the restaurant attest, have often involved putting on a white guayabera, the four-pocket dress shirt that often replaces a coat and tie in the Caribbean. This familiar theater of intransigence ­ a staple of South Florida life at least since the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, when C.I.A.-backed Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the new Communist regime ­ is ubiquitous. Some Cuban-Americans point hopefully to a softening in the Spanish-language, Cuba-focused radio outlets that now dominate the South Florida market. But for an outsider, what is striking is the degree to which the hard-line stance endures, since it might have been supposed that 50 years of failure to influence events on the island might have led to the conclusion that the hard-line position needed to be reconsidered. Most officeholders in Florida and, for that matter, most national politicians continue to at least pay lip service to the dream of a post-Communist Cuba, even though, early this year, Fidel Castro succeeded in seamlessly handing over power to his brother Raúl ­ testimony, if any was needed, to the stability of the regime.

Yet if Cuban Miami does indeed continue to dream, it is also beginning, quietly, tentatively and painfully, to adjust. Backstage, something very new is happening. Call it the Miami Spring, or Cuban-American glasnost. This community that has clung for decades to its certainties ­ about the island itself, about the role the exile community would play after the Castro brothers passed from the scene, about where Cuban-Americans should situate themselves in terms of U.S. domestic politics ­ is in ferment. This matters not only in terms of the destiny of the Cuban-American community itself but also in terms of the 2008 elections since, despite claims made on background by some of Barack Obama’s advisers, Florida is likely to play a pivotal role in determining whether Obama or John McCain becomes president, and the Cuban-American vote is likely to play its usual outsize role in deciding which candidate prevails in the state.

In the past, both Democratic and Republican contenders tried to conform to the hard-line expectations they perceived as the overwhelming consensus within the Cuban-American community. But Obama has recently strayed from orthodoxy by criticizing aspects of the American embargo on Cuba and asserting that he is prepared to open talks with the regime. This might seem like a golden opportunity for McCain to solidify his hold on the Cuban-American vote, but Obama’s views appear to be resonating in Cuban Miami more than anyone could have predicted. Two Democratic Congressional candidates in the Miami area ­ Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez ­ were added last month to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of potential “red to blue” conversions, bringing to 37 the number of seats nationally that the Democrats hope to flip away from the Republicans. For the first time, the hard-line consensus is being challenged. There is real debate in Cuban Miami these days about the embargo, above all about the series of further restrictions that were imposed by the Bush administration in 2003 and 2004. These limited travel for so-called people-to-people educational exchanges, abolished the category of “fully hosted” travel (under which travel to and from Cuba was underwritten by non-U.S. citizens and which Washington long suspected of being a scheme for money-laundering), reduced family visits to once every three years and limited the sending of money from Cubans or Cuban-Americans living in the United States to the sender’s immediate family ­ parents, siblings, children ­ rather than, as before, to his or her extended family. A decade ago, support for such restrictions and any other confrontational policy was a certainty in Cuban South Florida. So was its domestic corollary: dependable support for Republicans both locally and nationally. Today, and quite suddenly, that unwavering support for Republicans is no longer a given.

Even sudden change has roots, and this is true in South Florida. Eduardo Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College and himself a Democrat, told me recently: “This community was always a great deal more politically diverse than it was given credit for. And Cubans have always been more socially liberal than their voting patterns might suggest.” The architect Raúl Rodríguez ­ whom I accompanied on a number of family visits to the island in the early 1990s and who has been involved in civic affairs in South Florida for many years ­ put it more sharply: “This community has always been caricatured.”

The community is also more fluid than you might assume. Despite Republican dominance ever since President John F. Kennedy was seen as having betrayed the cause following the Bay of Pigs disaster, Cuban-American Democrats have been able to gain office from time to time. César Odio was Miami’s (appointed) city manager; Alex Penelas was mayor of Miami-Dade County during the Elián González controversy, in which, over fierce (and bipartisan) protests in Miami, the Clinton administration returned to Cuba a child whose father remained on the island and whose mother tried to take him with her to Florida in a makeshift raft but drowned on the voyage. But while Odio and Penelas were impeccably liberal on domestic issues, their attitudes toward the Castro regime were every bit as confrontational as those of their Republican rivals. Penelas took a leading role supporting those trying to keep Elián in Miami, while Odio was a key political adviser to Jorge Mas Canosa. Mas Canosa’s political action committee, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), had a reach in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s almost on a par with those of the American Association of Retired Persons or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Until Mas Canosa’s death in 1997, “the Foundation,” as it is almost universally referred to in Miami, could legitimately be described as the power in the exile community, and Mas Canosa ­ it was always difficult to separate the man from the institution ­ was the person to whom both Republican and Democratic administrations turned for the seal of approval on all matters related to Cuba policy. But there is little question that while he supported some Democrats and could work with them on local problems, on the national level, Mas Canosa, like his constituency, was strongly Republican. The speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Marco Rubio, is a Republican, as are all three of greater Miami’s Congressional representatives ­ Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and his brother, Mario Diaz-Balart ­ and one of Florida’s two senators, Mel Martinez. And only the most optimistic Democratic political operative would go so far as to claim that Cuban South Florida is likely to eschew John McCain for Barack Obama, any more than it opted for John Kerry or Al Gore over George W. Bush. Senator McCain almost certainly represented the majority view in Cuban Miami when he insisted, in a speech there in May, that to soften the travel restrictions or the limits on remittances “would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators ­ there is no need to undertake fundamental reforms; they can simply wait for a unilateral change in U.S. policy.”

But the fact that the Illinois senator would decide to take the bull by the horns and come out flatly for a less absolutist interpretation of Washington’s embargo in a speech before a Cuban-American audience in Miami ­ and be received warmly at the foundation by Jorge Mas Canosa’s son ­ is an emblem of the fact that the Cuban-American vote is in play even on what in exile politics is called el tema: the theme of the exile and of Cuba’s future. As Obama put it at the luncheon for him at the foundation: “I know what an easy thing it is to do for American politicians. Every four years, they come down to Miami, they talk tough, they go back to Washington and nothing changes in Cuba.” In a direct appeal to Cuban-American voters opposed to the restrictions on travel and remittances, the senator said it was “time to let Cuban-American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime.”

Whether Obama really expected to make inroads into the Cuban-American vote with the speech is questionable. When Hillary Clinton was still in the race, she was far more circumspect, even if, off the record, her aides expressed views not that dissimilar from those of the liberal Cuban-Americans whom Obama was echoing. But that the presumptive Democratic nominee would think the speech worth making at all, in a community where he is the subject of a great deal of mistrust and hostility and in a state where he is not polling well against Senator McCain, exemplifies the change that is taking place in the Cuban-American community.

The most significant emblems of this new dispensation in Miami, however, are closer to home. It had long been a commonplace of South Florida politics that greater Miami’s three Congressional representatives, Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers ­ who are descended from a prominent pre-Castro political family ­ could basically keep their seats for life, as previous South Florida congressmen like Claude Pepper and Dante Fascell did. But while Ros-Lehtinen is generally regarded as a shoo-in for re-election, the Diaz-Balart brothers are facing the first serious challenges of their careers. Instead of facing off against the comparative unknowns who have been the sacrificial lambs of the Democratic Party in the past in and around Miami, they are facing two extremely well-known (and surprisingly well-financed) Cuban-American Democrats: Raul Martinez, the controversial former mayor of the working-class (and overwhelmingly Cuban-American) city of Hialeah, just northwest of Miami, and a proven vote-getter for many years; and Joe Garcia, from his youth a protégé and then a trusted colleague of Jorge Mas Canosa’s and, after the older man’s death, his successor as head of the Cuban American National Foundation.

It is a stunning change. As recently as 2004, the Diaz-Balart brothers each won re-election easily. And while in the Democratic tsunami of 2006 their Democratic challengers did somewhat better than expected, no one really thought that genuinely credible opponents like Martinez and Garcia might decide to take on the brothers in 2008. Some people in Cuban Miami say privately that overconfidence led both congressmen to neglect bread-and-butter issues in their districts and not devote enough resources to constituent services. They point out that the third Cuban-American member of the House delegation, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, has constituent services second to none and is far more flexible on social questions than the Diaz-Balarts. (Her district now includes the heavily gay Florida Keys, and she has garnered considerable support there as well.) This, they say, rather than her views about Cuba, is what makes her own re-election such a virtual certainty.

The problem for the Diaz-Balart brothers is that this time they are facing competitors whose Cuban bona fides are beyond challenge, and who are more in tune with the social liberalism of much of the Cuban-American community. As Joe Garcia put it to me over coffee at the Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana, “Mario is not going to out-Cuban me, that’s one thing you ­ and he ­ can count on.” (Mario Diaz-Balart declined to be interviewed for an article in what his press spokesman described as the “left-wing New York Times,” asserting that it could not be objective; Lincoln Diaz-Balart simply did not respond to interview requests.) For his part, Raul Martinez points to intimidation of dissident voices in the past. “There is a fear in this community,” he said as we sat together in the living room of his home in Hialeah, “that if you speak out, then bad things will happen. I think that, in particular, businesspeople have been afraid of being denounced on talk radio or not getting contracts because they are too ‘controversial.’ ” This has now changed, he said, and the change is real, though he added, laughing, “It’s just that no one wanted to be the first person to call for it.”

Raul Martinez says he believes that Lincoln Diaz-Balart and his supporters will focus on the Cuba issue to the virtual exclusion of all others. “They have no other issues to discuss,” he said. “They have to attack me as objectively pro-Castro.” Referring to the Miami gossip that Lincoln Diaz-Balart retains political ambitions in Cuba after the fall of the regime, Martinez added: “I don’t want to be president of Cuba. When change comes to the island, I want to be a resource person.”

Martinez was scathing about Lincoln Diaz-Balart’s record on constituent service. It seemed clear that as far as he was concerned, the priority should always have been what you could bring back to your district. “Claude Pepper,” he said, “who held this seat for decades, brought back federal money for affordable housing. Lincoln was in Congress when I was mayor of Hialeah. He never brought any bacon home. What I got, I got from other congressmen. What has Lincoln done? As we say in Cuba, he has one song, and he’s sticking to it. I want to do what Pepper did, what Dante Fascell did.” But to achieve this, Martinez conceded, meant challenging the way political dialogue has been structured in the Cuban-American community for decades. He said he sensed it was happening. “Where people used to worry about being called Communists,” he told me, “and that was something that ended the conversation in Miami, now times have changed. What people say to me is not, ‘How can you dare take these positions,’ but, ‘What took you so long?’ ”

This does not mean that Cuban-American voters have become so assimilated into the American mainstream that they will vote pocketbook issues to the exclusion of Cuba-centered ones like the terms of the embargo or the role of the exile community. Both the painful wounds of exile and concern about the future of the island, rekindled now that Raúl Castro has settled into power, are never far from the surface in Cuban Miami, even among young people whose politics vis-à-vis Cuba are far less hard-line and confrontational than those of their parents and grandparents. “Everyone in Miami has been waiting to say that the exile is over,” Raúl Rodríguez told me. “But as Yogi Berra said, ‘It ain’t over ’til it’s over.’ ”

Just as the struggle between the exiles and the Castro regime was always a civil war in the most basic sense, pitting family member against family member, so the political schism in Miami is a family and often a generational affair. One of Joe Garcia’s young staff members, an Obama supporter, Giancarlo Sopo, exemplifies this. His biography is typical of leading families within the exile community. And if Sopo cannot be called representative, he is nonetheless one of a great many of the children and grandchildren of hard-line anti-Castro exiles to have come to believe that not only do things have to change in Cuba, but they have to change in Miami as well.

Over lunch in Miami Beach, Sopo was at pains to point out both what unites and what divides the generations. “My father was a Bay of Pigs veteran,” he told me. “He was in one of the first infiltration teams to go into Cuba before the landing. Later, he was Jorge Mas’s right-hand man at the foundation, a Ronald Reagan supporter to his core.” Sopo’s face hardened and his voice grew quieter: “My father died in 1999. He died frustrated because his dreams of returning to Cuba never came true. But I don’t believe my father died so that my generation could make the same mistakes. There has to be another way.”

For some in the older generation of Cuban exiles, Sopo’s “other way” is inevitable with the passage of time. As another former foundation stalwart, César Odio, observed grimly, “The exile will be over by death, with my generation dying out.” For Odio, young people like Sopo and Odio’s own younger son, who is also working for Obama, are typical of what in Miami is often referred to as the fourth generation (though Odio’s wife, Marian Prio, the daughter of a former president of Cuba, has been a strong backer of the Illinois senator from early in the campaign). “If things haven’t changed yet,” he told me, “they will soon enough. Not only are the historical exiles going away, but increasingly the community is either made up of people who consider themselves to be Americans first or, among the recent arrivals, people who grew up in Castro’s Cuba for whom the embargo as currently enforced simply makes no human sense. They, not the intransigents, are the majority now.”

Odio is certainly not alone in emphasizing the effect on South Florida politics of Cubans who have arrived since the early 1980s. Attitudes have been mutating for many years, particularly among people who have arrived from the island over the past decade and among the generation of young, native-born Cuban-Americans in college or now entering the work force, for whom Cuba is less a cause than a curiosity and, potentially at least, a business opportunity.

Both Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez are betting on these recent arrivals to help undermine the hard-liners. For many of the newcomers, Cuba is a place, not a cause; and to the extent they have a cause, it is the relatives they left behind not all that long ago and want to see regularly and help without restriction. Martinez flatly dismissed the idea that the ban on remittances was effective anyway. “If you go to a local barber,” he told me by way of illustration, “and people are reassured that you’re not from the F.B.I., they are likely to ask you how, not whether, they can send money to their relatives in Cuba. Everybody down here is doing it!”

Such rhetoric is part of Martinez’s argument for why voters should choose him over Lincoln Diaz-Balart. But when he talks about voters asking him indignantly, “The government’s going to tell me I can’t go see my family more than once every three years or send them money?” ­ or insists that anti-Castro intransigence has become “a business” for a Cuban-American establishment unwilling “to lose its franchise” ­ he is identifying a hunger for change that he maintains is widespread within the community.

Martinez’s fellow insurgent candidate, Joe Garcia, is convinced that the times have changed already. He does not repudiate the anti-Castro activism of Mas Canosa. Indeed, in conversation he speaks proudly both of Mas Canosa and of his own connection to him. But he claims that his own message of change is getting a hearing even among older, more hard-line voters. “Many of them,” he told me, “know just as well as I do that new times demand new solutions. I can speak with authority about the ways we tried in the past. I played a role in shaping them, after all. But I think if Jorge Mas were alive today, he would see that the world has changed and that we Cuban exiles, and Cuban-Americans, we have to change, too.”

When I told César Odio what Garcia had said, he smiled, though whether more out of amusement or bitterness was hard to say. “Look,” he told me flatly, “we tried intransigence, and it got us nothing in terms of actually affecting what took place on the island for all those years. It will be half a century next year since Castro seized power! Do you realize that? And when Castro turned over power to his brother, what effect did we in the exile have? The answer, unfortunately, is none whatsoever.” After a pause, he added, “And even if someone could promise us that we would be more effective at some point in the future, he has to face the fact that the commitments of people of my generation ­ people born in Cuba ­ are not the same as those of our children and grandchildren.” Anyone who spends much time with young Cuban-Americans in South Florida can vouch for the accuracy of this. As Odio put it, “The fourth generation of Cuban-Americans, born here of people born here, are not exiles; they’re Americans. Cuba is important to them, but it’s not everything to them, the way it is still to this day to many people in my generation.”

Whether this means a change in the monopoly on power that hard-line Cuban-Americans have maintained pretty much since they began to gain serious political power in the 1970s is another question. On the two key questions ­ whether pocketbook concerns will trump exile politics in the 2008 election cycle, and whether there is now enough opposition to the ban on remittances and the limitations on travel ­ the jury is still out, and will be until the fall elections decide the matter. After all, Democrats have won in Miami-Dade County (that is, greater Miami) before. John Kerry carried the city in 2004. But no one suggests that he did so with Cuban-American votes or that his victory represented any great shift in the community’s attitudes. Even if the Democratic victories are as widespread in November as the consensus among political consultants and pundits suggests, the electoral math may still not add up for Cuban-American Democrats. Modesto Maidique, president of Florida International University, argues that John McCain will be a powerful candidate both in Cuban South Florida and in the state generally, and he is almost certainly correct. And the Democratic consultants and campaign workers I spoke with struck me as taking their wishes for reality when they suggested that McCain won’t have coattails. As the influential State Representative David Rivera, admittedly himself an interested party on the Republican side of the political divide, put it to me: “I concede that if you poll people who have come here from Cuba over the past decade, they feel differently than the 1959 or even the Mariel generation. But I think the people who say they represent a fundamental shift are deluding themselves.”

Yet even Rivera conceded that the hard-line voting bloc is aging. His conviction that the 2008 cycle would comfortably return Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart to Congress and help put Florida’s electoral votes in John McCain’s column was, in part at least, based on his belief that “it’s older people who vote.” As he told me, “We call them supervoters, and they are overwhelmingly hard-line anti-Castro and pro-democracy.” Of the Mariel generation ­ between that of the revolutionary-era exiles and the most recent generations, and named for the harbor from which as many as 125,000 people left Cuba for the U.S. in 1980 ­ Rivera said it was predominantly, if not monolithically, “anti-Castro, pro-democracy, anti-Communist.”

Regarding the 300,000 or more people who have come from Cuba to the United States in the past 10 years, Rivera presented a subtle picture. “Anecdotally,” he told me, “it’s not that the post-1994 generation is pro-Castro, but instead that they think politics ruined their lives in Cuba, and so they are deeply apolitical. Whatever my Democratic friends may be telling themselves, whatever Raul [Martinez] and Joe [Garcia] may be hoping, they’re not ready to be energized politically.” There is little doubt that antipolitics is the strongest form of politics among these recent arrivals. Unlike earlier generations of exiles, most are not mourning the non-Communist Cuba that was and might have been. For them, Communism is a fact of life from childhood, not something alien ­ however much most may detest the regime and be glad to have made their way to the U.S. And while most would probably say they value the freedoms of the United States, there is little doubt that many, if not most, left for economic and family reasons.

How this translates into American politics is another question. When I asked Rivera if he thought that, in the long run, this generation would not alter the political terms of reference in the Cuban-American community, his answer was curiously ambiguous and seemed more like a statement of faith than the conclusion of a hardheaded, savvy modern American politician. “By the time you have critical mass,” he said musingly, “with an ability to make a difference, we may all be back in Cuba.”

Marco Rubio, speaker of the Florida Legislature and Rivera’s colleague, friend and political ally ­ both men supported Mike Huckabee in the Republican primaries, then endorsed John McCain and are working hard for him throughout South Florida ­ was at pains to emphasize his sympathy for anyone who wanted to send money to their relatives on the island. Like Rivera, Rubio readily conceded that people who have arrived in Miami from Cuba in the past 5 to 10 years did harbor different attitudes. “It would be disingenuous of me to pretend otherwise,” he told me. But Rubio thoughtfully defended the 2004 restrictions on both practical and ethical grounds. “Let me give you some context,” he told me, “the kind of context I don’t hear when I listen to Joe or Raul ­ and incidentally, Raul has been a career politician for 30 years, and Joe has been politically active for years, so I don’t really see how they can call themselves new faces on the South Florida scene.” Having made his point, Rubio returned to the context of the embargo: “First of all, in 2004, we had realized that unrestricted remittances had become a cash cow for the Castro regime. As for the travel limitations, I would never criticize anyone for visiting family members. But that wasn’t the problem. What you had was a situation where people would come to Miami from Cuba, stay for a year and a day and then go back. And what this was doing was threatening the sustainability of the Cuban Adjustment Act itself, the U.S. law that gives Cubans who come to this country a special status as political exiles rather than immigrants.

“What makes Cubans different from Haitians who come here or anyone else,” Rubio went on, “if they go back and forth, that is to say, if they’re not exiles at all? In that case, why should Cubans be any different? The whole structure would have unraveled had something not been done.”

Rubio was saying that neither Washington nor the Cuban-exile community could accept a historical-political exile morphing into a contemporary economic migration. It was an argument that I was surprised not to have heard more often from supporters of the Diaz-Balarts and other politicians on the Republican side: that the embargo was necessary to preserve the status of Cubans in America as political exiles. At the least, the recent intensification of the debate within the Cuban-American community has caused people like Rubio to defend positions that initially seem more like role reversal than political orthodoxy. Thus, supporters of a loosening of the embargo spoke about the emancipatory effects of tourism and big business while a conservative like Rubio justified the embargo at least in part because, as he put it, “otherwise American businesses will just go to Cuba and prefer to do business with the government. Corporations are not interested in democracy; they’re interested in making money, in capitalism. Look at China. There businesses don’t have to abide by environmental standards, union rights, human rights generally.” It is a peculiar world when the conservative hard-liners fear the results of a free market and the left-leaning reformers want to give capitalism a chance.

Whether Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez win their bet, or instead, the Diaz-Balarts manage to win in what will almost certainly be a very bad cycle for Congressional Republicans, the change in Cuban Miami is palpable. Even the rhetoric of Washington politicians campaigning in South Florida seems to have grown more nuanced, as if these politicians and their staffs know that even David Rivera’s hard-line “supervoters” are no longer as likely to be appeased by symbolism as they often were in the past. After Senator Obama’s speech produced little outcry ­ with only a few diehards accusing him and the foundation, which hosted him, of being Communists or the dupes of Communists ­ Raúl Rodríguez said to me that what he and many people he knew were most grateful for was that, so far, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama “put on a guayabera or shouted, ‘Viva Cuba libre.’ It may have taken 50 years, but that at least is no longer acceptable.”

David Rieff, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir.” His book “The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami” was published in 1993.