The first time I ever heard Sen. Marco Rubio speak was in 2008 at a Cuban American National Foundation luncheon in Miami. Then Florida’s speaker of the House, Rubio reminded a crowd of mostly older exiles how they had become “the subject of ridicule by national publications.” A 37-year-old Rubio remarked that Cuban Americans are “the only ethnic group in America that is politically correct to attack.”
Rubio’s words stirred me, and pierced through my youthful liberalism, because I knew them to be true. Cuban Americans have been a thorn on the side of the Left for decades.
The future senator’s words have proven prescient, as progressives’ anti-Cuban bigotry has grown in recent years. It was on full display in a CNN op-ed published Thursday. Lamenting Democrat Julian Castro’s exit from the presidential race, columnist Raul A. Reyes wrote that “unlike former presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Castro was — like the majority of US Latinos — Mexican American, and very proud of his humble origins.”
Reyes’ dog-whistle was clear: To some on the Left, conservative Cuban Americans do not count as Latinos.
Reyes’ caricature of the two senators as a couple of snobs who are ashamed of their heritage traffics in anti-Cuban American tropes and was especially laughable considering that Castro does not even speak Spanish. The charge against Rubio and Cruz is also untrue.
With his mother by his side, Rubio introduced himself to the country as the proud “son of exiles” during his election night victory speech in 2010 and spoke in perfect Spanish at the Republican National Convention two years later. Meanwhile, Cruz regularly reminds his supporters of his father’s struggles as a new immigrant.
Of course, all of this information is easily accessible, but Reyes’ hateful anti-Cuban diatribe overlooked it nonetheless. A possible reason is that Cuban Americans rank low on the intersectional Left’s hierarchy of victimhood because we tend to be conservative. It is no secret that this has generated resentment toward Cubans among other Hispanics and self-righteous white progressives alike.
Additionally, Cuban Americans turn out to vote and have decided several key elections that progressives believed they were destined to win.
Most famously, although George W. Bush lost the national popular vote in 2000, he won about 80% of the Cuban American vote in Florida — a sizable improvement from Bob Dole’s 1996 performance that ultimately clinched Bush the Electoral College and the presidency. More recently, in 2018, two-thirds of Cuban Americans voted for Republican Ron DeSantis over his progressive challenger, Andrew Gillum. In doing so, Cuban Americans helped elect DeSantis governor of Florida.
The intersectional Left’s anger toward Cuban Americans for resisting the edicts of our country’s self-appointed moral overlords has grown with the Democratic Party’s increasing addiction to identity politics.
In 2017, for instance, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a historically bipartisan organization, denied membership to Rep. Carlos Curbelo for the crime of being a moderate Republican. Last October, Democrat State Rep. Cindy Polo bitterly attacked “Cuban Republicans” as hypocrites pushing “a false narrative” after a group of elected officials participated in a reception with the president of Colombia where she was not invited.
After the 2016 election, a progressive Chicano writer attacked Cuban exiles in Remezcla for joining “GOP anti-immigrant hysteria for decades” while downplaying the cruelty of Cuba’s communist regime. Similarly, in December 2018, NBC published an op-ed singling out Cuban Americans as joining forces with “anti-Latino racists” to elect President Trump.
Of course, both writers bulldozed over the history of Cuban American lawmakers from both parties consistently championing immigrant causes in Congress, but facts and nuances are pesky inconveniences to angry ideologues.
Cuban Americans owe nothing to the far Left, a movement that has anointed a cadre of socialists (who claim to care about Latinos but cannot bring themselves to denounce brutal dictators such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro) as its thought leaders. Nor will we devote a scintilla of loyalty to a political party whose presidential nominee may be Sen. Bernie Sanders, who cheered on Fidel Castro as he executed political prisoners and expelled our friends and families from their country.
Writers such as Raul A. Reyes and others who peddle anti-Cuban bigotry may resent us conservative Cuban Americans for it, but we will continue to vote in accordance with our values — whether they like it or not.
Giancarlo Sopo is a writer at TheBlaze and was a 2019 regional fellow at the National Review Institute. Follow him at @GiancarloSopo.
