Cuban Americans in Miami are proving Donald Trump right on one issue.
He could, as the Republican presidential front-runner famously boasted in 2016 Iowa, stand in the middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue “and shoot somebody,” and he wouldn’t lose voters.
In Miami, make that famous corridor Calle Ocho, and make the target of Trump’s narcissistic wrath democracy itself.
The ex-president’s assault on democracy, apparently, means nothing to the majority of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade, a new poll confirms. They’re as blind as their forebears who supported Fidel Castro in 1959.
President Trump knowingly lied to voters about the results of the 2020 election.
He almost, for the first time in U.S. history tried to derail the peaceful transfer of power and stage a coup. He stole classified documents. And he, three of his children and his Trump Organization stand accused of criminal activity.
Trump vs. DeSantis
And still, Trump, the American caudillo, not only doesn’t lose Cuban-American supporters in Miami, but six years later, gains even more. He’s so well-liked among this reliable group of Florida voters, according to a Florida International University poll, that he’s more popular than Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Sorry, governor — despite culture wars that are right up the alley of Republican Cuban Americans and Latino conservatives who like racial segregation, want to see gays back in the closet and think they can force their beliefs on other people’s children and bodies — they still like the clown better.
Cuban Americans want Trump on the ballot in 2024, say poll results — a scary preference that confirms the mind-boggling radicalization of Miami, where the combination of conservative Cuban Americans and Latino evangelicals who also dote on Trump make up a powerful voting bloc.
Add to the mix recently arrived Cubans: Once fidelistas, now trumpistas, same radicalism, same consumption of disinformation, and the results are: President Biden is toast.
A majority of Cuban Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy and Cuba policy, and plan to vote Republican down ballot on Nov. 8. Indeed, Biden might as well stay north of the Miami Dade-Broward line when he travels to Fort Lauderdale Tuesday to campaign for Charlie Crist.
The cult-like thinking in Miami is nearly impossible to crack — and to blame the lack of caring about Trump’s assault on democracy on rampant disinformation is no longer a valid excuse.
There are Cuban-American independents, Democrats and nonpartisan Miami institutions working hard to provide voters with facts.
“We are daughters of the historic exile and we care about the state of American democracy, and this is why we organized after the events of Jan. 6,” Carolina Camps, president of the group Cuban American Women Supporting Democracy, told me. “What is happening in Miami is incredible. In what other countries do you see a violent mob on the street trying to impede a democratic transition? In the countries our parents fled. How can we support that here?”
Yet, whenever Cuban-American Republican candidates are publicly asked to account for how they square their support for Trump with his betrayal, their answer is to deflect the conversation to Biden and the shortcomings the GOP has assigned him.
“Republicans have nowhere to go but to be MAGA Republicans,” Camps says. “They can’t veer from that line — or they lose. They’re not going to be Liz Cheney. No one wants to lose.”
Still, the level of support for Trump is incomprehensible.
Cuba policy
Trump, always an opportunist, was a Clinton Democrat and likely violated the U.S. embargo on Cuba when he sent teams to the island to negotiate real-estate deals and registered his trademark in 2008. He only changed teams when he couldn’t strike a favorable enough deal with the Cuban government to build a Havana tower and a golf course.
During his four years in office, Trump did nothing to make inroads in Cuba or Venezuela. In fact, he left both countries farther away from democracy than he found them under President Obama.
In light of the brutal crackdown and jailing of protesters in Cuba, Biden has maintained Trump’s sanctions and, at the same time, taken measures to help the Cuban people. Yet, the Cuban Americans polled say they don’t support Biden’s policy toward Cuba.
It makes no sense.
But what does resonate with Cuban-American Republicans is the demonization campaign waged against Democrats, portrayed as “socialists” by Florida’s GOP. This irrational, induced hatred for Democrats far outweighs any common sense when these same voters value the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits the GOP’s congressional leadership has threatened to dismantle.
There’s a saying in Spanish to describe people who self-inflict pain — “somos hijos del maltrato” — We are children of abuse — and it fits Miami’s continued adoration of the lying, cheating New Yorker and Trumpism perfectly.
That Trump ushered in an era in which women, gays, and minorities are losing rights is of no concern. That DeSantis, his mini-me, is an ambitious young politician who sees in Trump’s downfall as his road to the White House — and is leading Florida down the path of fascism to get there — doesn’t keep any Cuban-American Republicans up at night.
Perhaps, they’re following in the sins of our fathers — the generation that blindly supported Castro, and by the time they woke up and tried to reverse course, democracy had been deeply buried.
Sixty-three years later, Cuba is still enslaved by the stronghold of a Castroite regime, and Miami embraces another kind of tyrant.
Cuban Americans won’t get off the Trump train.
Useful fools.
It’s their loss — and Cuba’s too.
