The mass protests in Cuba present a unique situation for the Biden administration, which has a chance to use calls for democracy on the island to bolster its voting rights push.
A senior White House official told the Washington Examiner on Monday that President Joe Biden, who was criticized by some progressives for not sufficiently using the bully pulpit to prevent Senate Republicans from killing the “For the People Act” in June, won’t directly address the demonstrations in Cuba when he delivers his voting rights speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Still, that person conceded that drawing parallels between those two admittedly vastly different situations could help frame the voting rights issue in a light that earns support from Republican lawmakers who had previously opposed Democrats’ voting rights initiative but were quick to endorse the protests against Cuba’s communist government.
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The White House official said that different people might react to both subjects differently and told the Washington Examiner they plan to raise the comparison in high-level strategy discussions.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, and even former President Donald Trump all released statements Monday in support of the protesters that sounded eerily similar to Biden’s response.
“After decades of suffering through a communist dictatorship, the Cuban people deserve liberty,” McCarthy wrote. “I am proud to stand in solidarity with the people of Cuba who are calling out for freedom.”
Rubio tweeted that the protests marked the Cuban people’s “rapidly” mounting “frustration with the dictatorship’s incompetence, greed & repression.”
Trump claimed that “Biden and the Democrats campaigned on reversing [his] very tough stance on Cuba” but that he stood “with the Cuban people 100% in their fight for freedom.”
“The Cuban people deserve freedom and human rights,” he continued. “They are not afraid!”
Meanwhile, Biden’s Monday morning statement positioned the United States as standing “with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime.”
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“The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights,” the president added. “Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s Monday comments about Biden’s voting rights push also echoed that language.
She told reporters during the White House press briefing that the president’s Tuesday speech will “lay out the moral case for why denying the right to vote is a form of suppression and a form of silencing.”
Biden would also frame recent election security laws passed by some Republican-controlled states as “authoritarian and anti-American.”
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld two such election laws passed in Arizona.
The decision, delivered on 6-3 partisan lines, found that both laws were constitutional as neither violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act or were written with racially discriminatory intent.
Voting has become a highly polarized issue in the wake of the 2020 general election.
According to data published in July by Marist, PBS, and NPR, 85% of Democrats were “more concerned” with “making sure that everyone who wants to vote can do so” over “making sure that no one votes who is not eligible,” while 72% of Republicans answered in the opposite fashion.
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Overall, two-thirds of the 1,115 adults surveyed between June 22-29 felt that democracy is “under threat.”
