MIAMI — The politics of Miami’s Cuban American population, at times, have as many shades as the coffee with milk ordered at the city’s many coffee windows. But the victory of Joe Biden has turned the group more solidly red, experts and voters say.
“It’s terrible what happened,” said Cuban American Eva Vega, 51, in a Spanish-language interview with the Washington Examiner outside a La Carreta coffee window on a recent muggy Miami morning.
“I don’t like the socialist ideas of Biden and Kamala,” Vega said about Biden, the president-elect, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
“I don’t have confidence for here, for us, for the economy, for work. It’s terrible,” Vega said in reference to Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator.
Vega is part of the post-Mariel wave of Cubans who immigrated to the United States after 1980 and have shown, in recent elections, themselves to be less solidly Republican than their ’60s-era predecessors.
Standing at a high-top table and cradling a Styrofoam cup of heavily sweetened espresso, Reynaldo Chinea, 60, said he did everything he could to assure a Trump victory.
“I only care about Cuba,” said Chinea, who immigrated to Miami in 1998. “I did everything I could for Trump because I think Trump was doing the right things toward Cuba.”
Chinea disliked Obama-era policies such as reestablishing diplomatic relations with the communist island, expanding family travel and remittances, and President Barack Obama’s decision to release three Cuban spies jailed in Miami.
“Biden is going to form a leftist government, so leftist, almost an extreme Left government!” said Chinea in Spanish, citing the president-elect’s relationship with Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I’m going to have to forget about Cuba because Biden isn’t going to do anything.”
Florida political analysts have observed a splintering of the once solidly Republican Cuban American vote in recent years. But, that may be changing as later, Democratic-voting immigrants join their post-revolutionary brethren to cast votes for the GOP.
“It’s kind of hard to come up with something when you have people in your party saying things that looked like it’s socialism,” University of South Florida professor and Florida political analyst Susan MacManus told the Washington Examiner.
“There was never a strong, effective antidote or counterargument to combat the socialism,” she said, recounting the vehement complaints of Democrats voted out of office Nov. 3, including two members of Congress.
MacManus said the distaste for socialism crossed Cuban immigration waves and family generational divides, even among those who had voted Democratic in past elections.
“Socialism was such a powerful element and thing that sort of melded them together,” she said.
MacManus said 40% of Florida’s youth are registered with no party affiliation, and while Democrats hope they just ran a bad election this year, there is some evidence of a permanent shift.
“One of the main changes is an overall, and it’s not even just a Cuban and Venezuelan, but an overall Hispanic move more towards the Right in this election,” Florida political data consultant Matthew Isbell told the Washington Examiner.
“The collapse, so to speak, was by far the largest in Miami-Dade and South Florida in general, where there’s larger Cuban and Venezuela and the Colombian populations,” he said, noting how the solid blue territory weakened considerably this election cycle. “It was an overall Hispanic issue.”
Isbell said the changes are not necessarily permanent but had a lot to do with better Republican voter turnout and a strong GOP ground game.
“It’s also clear that regardless of voter turnout differences, there was a voter swing to the Right,” he said.
At least one ‘60s-era Cuban American immigrant in Miami said he did vote for Biden, but he believes he is in the minority.
“Trump is a narcissist who isn’t doing anything good for the United States,” said Alberto Casas, 60, who immigrated in the first wave after Fidel Castro took power and became a symbol of socialism in the hemisphere.
Casas said in a Spanish-language interview with the Washington Examiner that the fear of a socialist takeover in America was “ridiculous” because of the strength of U.S. institutions and entrenched capitalism.
“Cuban politics is not the responsibility of the United States. It is the responsibility of Cubans,” he said. “It’s us Cubans who put in Castro, and it’s us Cubans who should change that.”
