MANY DEMOCRATS seem convinced that George W. Bush is losing traction with his Cuban-American base in South Florida. Press coverage of the administration’s new anti-Castro measures–which tighten restrictions on family travel to Cuba, limit personal gift packages to the island, and reduce the per-day sum that visiting Americans may spend–has generally cast them as a political misfire. So have some Republicans. When, on July 7, the House voted 221-194 to block enforcement of the gift-package cap, 46 Republicans broke ranks with the administration. Arizona’s Jeff Flake has warned that the measures could alienate enough Cuban Americans to tip Florida to Kerry in November.
The new regulations, which took effect on June 30, are designed to fortify the U.S. travel ban and deny the Cuban regime access to hard currency. They do essentially four things: redefine “family” to include only parents and children; allow family visits only once every three years, down from once a year; restrict parcel contents to vital items such as food and medicine; and reduce the daily spending limit of visitors to Cuba from $167 to $50.
The Kerry campaign sees an opening here. In early June, Sergio Bendixen and the New Democrat Network found Kerry leading Bush 40 percent to 29 percent (with 31 percent undecided) among Miami-Dade Cubans who came to the United States during or after the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Bendixen estimates that this group includes 75,000 registered voters. Many in this post-1980 generation–particularly those who have arrived since the 1994 Clinton-Castro migration agreement–consider themselves traditional economic immigrants, as opposed to political refugees. Bendixen distinguishes them from “old guard” Cuban exiles, who came before 1980 and number some 250,000 voters in Miami-Dade. This group still overwhelmingly supports Bush over Kerry, 89 percent to 8 percent. Democrats have seized on Bendixen’s polling as evidence of a growing “generation gap” in Cuban-American political sympathies that will gradually erode a bedrock GOP constituency.
As Bendixen sees it, opposition to the administration’s new policies is “energizing people” in the post-1980 demographic, since “almost every one of these voters still has family in Cuba.” He says the issue could cost Bush Florida and the election. Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, agrees that Bush will suffer among younger Cuban voters–voters who otherwise “would’ve stayed home” in November. “The president can’t afford to lose one percent [of the Cuban-American vote],” Garcia adds, “much less the 9 or 10 percent that this may cost.”
He has a point: Exit polls in 2000 showed that Bush captured between 80 percent and 85 percent of the Cuban vote in Florida. That translates into more than 350,000 votes–in a state he carried by just 537. “If one percent [of Cuban-Americans] had stayed home,” Garcia says, “we’d be talking about President Gore.” No kidding–and in 2000, Bush’s support was swollen by outrage over the Elián González affair. So the question is not whether Bush will win a majority of Cuban-American voters–undoubtedly he will–but how big his majority will be.
The answer isn’t obvious. On the one hand, longterm trends do seem to augur a shift in voting patterns among Cuban Americans. Bendixen persuasively shows that younger Cubans do not necessarily share the strong GOP inclination of the older generation. As James Gimpel, an expert on the politics of immigration at the University of Maryland, points out, the original Cuban exiles who arrived in the 1960s were generally middle class, entrepreneurial, and relatively affluent. They also benefited from the largesse of the unusually generous Cuban Refugee Program. The more recent arrivals tend to be poorer, which may make them less receptive to traditional Republican messages on domestic policy. Of course, Cuban Americans’ historic ties to the GOP are rooted in anticommunism. When, eventually, the Castro dictatorship is gone, the durability of those ties will be tested.
That said, the weakening of Bush’s Cuban base has been exaggerated. While the new travel and remittance restrictions may provoke some anti-Bush sentiment among younger voters, Dario Moreno, a specialist in Cuban-American politics at Florida International University, argues that these Cubans “were not going to vote for the president in the first place.” At the same time, he explains, the measures “will help Bush among Cuban Americans on the right who were upset [that the White House hadn’t done enough on Cuba] and might otherwise have stayed home.” Moreno has been conducting polls of Florida Cubans for Campaign Data, Inc., since the mid-1990s. His recent findings put Cuban support for President Bush between 78 percent and 85 percent. He believes, moreover, that the vast majority of Cuban Americans support the administration’s new policies.
Mel Martinez, Bush’s former housing secretary and now a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Florida, says that before the policies were announced, “there was anxiety” among the older exiles “that [Bush] had not done enough.” Indeed, even staunch conservatives such as Luis Zuniga of the Cuban Liberty Council were predicting a lower “old guard” turnout. Now, Martinez indicates, the travel and remittance measures have galvanized this community in favor of Bush. In his own Senate campaign, he adds, he’s “proudly running on the new measures,” which he helped draft as a member of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.
Marco Rubio, Republican majority leader of the Florida House, similarly predicts that any increased turnout among younger Cubans in support of Kerry will be more than offset by an increased turnout for Bush among older exiles. For that matter, Miami congressman Mario Diaz-Balart is not convinced that the younger generation is any less firmly anti-Castro than the old guard. He points out that in 2002, his Democratic opponent–Annie Betancourt, the widow of a Bay of Pigs veteran–all but turned their House race into a referendum on the U.S. embargo, which she opposes. In the end, Rep. Diaz-Balart won between 90 percent and 95 percent of the Cuban-American vote–“and I represent the youngest district in the state of Florida,” he says.
“When you bring up the Cuba issue, younger Cubans are the most hard-line,” Diaz-Balart insists. He cites a February 2004 poll commissioned by the Washington-based Cuba Democracy Advocates, which found that nearly 80 percent of Cuban Americans who’ve arrived since 1990 believe the best way to expedite regime change in their homeland is either to “mount a military operation” or to “tighten sanctions.”
Diaz-Balart also notes that he and his brother Lincoln, another Miami congressman, have each received hundreds of phone calls from Cubans in support of the new measures and only a handful against them. And when Francisco Aruca, a fiery pro-Castro radio commentator in South Florida, took to the airwaves to organize a demonstration outside Lincoln’s Miami office in late June, only three protesters showed up–while a spontaneous pro-Bush rally nearby drew several dozen.
For his part, John Kerry has sharply denounced the administration’s new Cuba initiatives and called for “principled travel”–whatever that may be–to the island. But Kerry has a broader credibility problem on Cuba. To wit, he’s been on both sides of the embargo question. He’s criticized, then un-criticized, the work of Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya. And he has said he voted in favor of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened the embargo, when in fact he voted for an early version of the legislation but opposed the final bill.
Kerry’s hopes of siphoning off Cuban-American votes from Bush ultimately rest on two notions: first, that younger Cubans will take a softer line toward the Castro regime than those who arrived before 1980; second, that the new travel and remittance rules will trigger proportionally more anti-Bush feeling among the post-1980 generation than they will pro-Bush feeling among the pre-1980 generation. If these turn out to be correct, Kerry may well win in Florida.
Duncan Currie is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
