The best answer I can come up with is that they talk about the Hispanic vote simply to hear themselves talk, because they certainly haven’t any idea of what they think their talking about. And neither does the media. That is most obvious of all.
The Hispanics in Florida are as varied as their needs and opinions. Each group, based on former nationality, work for their own pollitical interests without much cohesion or commonalities beyond their general Latino roots. But they are the first to point out the differen and often conflicting objectives of each group. To romance one group, can mean failure with the others.
For instance, there is a significant and growing Puerto Rican community all along the I-4 corridor who are divided on their main issue concerning whether or not Puerto Rico should get full statehood. Many are against more Mexican immigration for some reason and they don’t trust the Cubans. The PR faction is historically solidly Democrat on most issues except those that interfere with their Catholicism, such as the abortion argument.
Then there is a significant and growing Mexican population of new, legal immigrants, mostly in Florida’s north, west, central and south central agricultural regions and the resort areas along the coast. In other words, they are nearly everywhere. At this time, these people are mostly of lower and lower middle classes, solid Democrats and are, of course, for a more liberal immigration policy. They are a labor class who are so preoccupied by survival that it is doubtful, if they are politicized at, that they have political interests beyond those concerning their own needs. They work long, hard hours, are family-oriented, and devout in their religious beliefs.
Then you have a solidly middleclass, well educated, highly Americanized Cuban group who have been on Florida’s central west coast, centered in Tampa’s Ybor City, and south at Key West since the 1890s who identify with the Democratic Party on most issues. They are solidly for opening American travel to Cuba without restrictions and do not have the naked animosity toward Castro exibited by the Miami Cubans, they are leery of Cuban communism, but still identify strongly with their Cuban cultural roots. Overwhelmingly, this group wants the Cuban embargo to end and they want to get back to doing business with the old country through the old family connections.
Then there is the second wave of Cuban refugees, the ones that arrived in the Mariel Boat Lift of the early 1980s, known as Los Marielitos. These arrived as undereducated, indigents of a darker color and are looked down upon by the earlier, lighter skinned, better educated, and more affluent refugees of the first wave in the 1960s and 70s. They have melted into the American social strata and today have a small political voice. They are not well organized and not known to be politicized like the first wave.
And finally, you have a huge pain-in-the-ass hurricane in a teacup that, upon analysis, is nothing more than a family feud that has kept local, state and national politicians, policy makers, military, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA and INS personnel, and many of the refugees themselves gainfully employed on American tax dollars for the past two and a half generations. It involves a small, localized population which is tiny in comparison to many of the other politicized Latino groups in the US, but much more powerful in Washington than most national PACs and are able to influence US foreign policy unimagined by most US citizens.
These are the people involved in the first wave of refugees from the 1959 Cuban revolution whose politics have been unvaryingly defined by their anti-Castroism more than any other issue to the extent that, because President Kennedy failed to prosecute the Bay of Pigs invasion to their satisfaction, have voted blindly for the Republican Party ever since. They were an affluent, ambitious crowd, members of the middle and upper-middle class of Cuba under Fulgencio Batista and they liked the way things were going, thank you very much, until those brutal peasants, led by one of their own, came howling out of the mountains and reduced Cuba to Communism.
This first wave of Cubans to Miami were from the beginning dominated politically by the Diaz-Balart family, the anti-Castro organization La Rosa Blanca and their enmity toward Fidel Castro. If the individual Miami Cuban’s personal politics, didn’t comply with the Diaz-Balart family’s personal hatred of Fidel Castro, if they didn’t vote the right way and for the right issues, if their anti-Castro resolved weakened slightly, if they surreptitiously slipped off to Mexico City for the 3pm plane to Havana merely to visit family, then they would have to deal with the terrorist and former Cuban Chief of the Secret Police, Rolando Masferer and his Los Tigres. This explains the unvarying loyalty to the Republican Party and the vast amounts of personal wealth the Miami Cuban Community poured into the party to ensure the continued American boycott of Cuba by a group representing 0.04% of the US population. To understand this level of passion, animosity, and political clout, one must know a little about the history of the Castros, the Diaz-Balarts, and pre-Castro Cuban politics.
From the 1920’s on, Rafael Diaz-Balart, Sr., was a very well-connected Cuban lawyer with a practice dedicated to one very special client: The United Fruit Company (UFC magically transformed into Chiquita Banana complete with a perky Carmen Miranda lookalike as a mascot for PR reasons after years of disastrous news reports of UFC’s involvement in right-wing military government overthrows, forced peasant removals and the destruction of private farms complete with political assassination and torture). The Diaz-Balart family home was in the Oriente province town of Banes, a United Fruit Company town, and there Rafael, Sr.’s progeny grew up alongside other future Cuban leaders such as future Cuban president and dictator, Fulgensio Batista and Rolando Masferer. Rafael, Sr., had a son, Rafael, Jr., who eventually went off to the University of Havana law school and became best friends with another law student, Fidel Castro. They attended liberal anti-government meetings together.
Fidel Castro grew up in an Oriente town near Banes. His father, the Castilian peasant Angel Castro, had come to Cuba as a soldier in the Imperial Spanish army which was sent to put down the peasant revolts of the late 19th century. After mustering out of the army, he stayed and went to work for United Fruit Company as a guajiro in the Oriente Province. He worked hard over the years, saved and lived simply, and began buying significant amounts of land from American Fruit so rapidly that the joke around United Fruit was that while the company execs slept at night, Angelo moved the fences. He eventually did very well for himself and by the time his bastard son, Fidel, was in his teens, the Castro family was very wealthy even by American standards. But being of peasant stock, the Castros were not entirely welcome among the country club set like the Diaz-Balarts.
At the University of Havana, the boisterous Fidel became quite popular, a classic BMOC, head of the debating team, first string center on the basketball team, and with his buddy, the more retiring Rafael Diaz-Balart, Jr.’s encouragement, Castro dated his sister, the beautiful society debutant, Mirta Diaz-Balart. After law school, friction between the two college friends developed when Castro chose the revolutionary way to reform while Rafael, Jr. chose to work within the system, becoming head of the youth party under Batista. And before Rafael could realize his mistake of facilitating his sister’s relationship with Castro, she married Castro. By the time Fidel and his comrades had unsuccessfully, attacked the Moncada Baracks, she was pregnant with the all-important first-born son, Fidelito, forever mixing the noble blood of Diaz-Balart with that of the peasant revolutionary Castro. For the bloody Moncada Barracks fiasco, Castro was imprisoned at the Isla de Pinos where he was tortured, his life being spared only by the reluctant influence of Mirta’s family. And so it was game on.
In the 1950s, Rafael Diaz-Balart, Sr. passed on, (it is said by some that he died of grief over his favorite daughter’s choice of a husband), Rafael, Jr. became Minister of the Interior under the brutal Batista regime (under which operated the secret police headed by Rafael Jr.’s childhood friend, Rolando Masferer and his elite paramilitary enforcers, Los Tigres), and Castro went on to succeed Batista as dictator of Cuba through bloody revolution.
Upon arrival in Miami beginning in 1959, the Diaz-Balarts found that the buying of political influence in America wasn’t much different from that of Cuba in what the American press had earlier and repeatedly referred to as Batista’s top-down corrupt Cuban society. All one had to do was pour money into the campaigns of certain US Congressmen and Senators, buy congressional seats for members of your family and friends, purchase enough national media time to plant the idea of imminent communist danger at America’s southern doorway into the empty heads of the American populace, and take full advantage of the legal bribery referred to in America as Lobbying. With money, you could get anything you want, even repeated assassination attempts on your brother-in-law.
Rafael, Jr. became an investment banker and with the likes of Roland Masferer working in the background, gained control of the Florida’s 21st congressional district‘s_21st_congressional_district even placing his older son, Lincoln, there between 1993 and 2011 to be succeeded by the younger son, Mario, in 2011. No other party even put up a candidate when filing closed on April 30, handing the seat to Mario Diaz-Balart. Indeed, since the 21st’s creation, the Republican candidate has run unopposed in all but two elections. Mario previously served Florida’s 25th congressional district from 2003 to 2011. The 25th is actually a slightly marginal district on paper. In contrast, the 21st is considered the most Republican district in the Miami area.
Other new generation products of the Diaz-Balart machine are Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Marco Rubio. The one thing all these elected representatives have in common is their rabid desire to maintain the Cuban embargo and the destruction of Fidel Castro, his political machine, and his family. Their careers depend on it.
But there has been a much darker force at work in Miami thanks to Masferer types and CIA funding. Since the arrival of the initial Cuban wave of refugees in 1959, reputations and businesses have been destroyed, people burned, blown up and shot in the streets of Miami at the first sign of any softening of anti-Castro sentiment within this mostly affluent Cuban-American community. Under these conditions, nobody really knows what this group of Miami Cubans really want. They have never been entirely free of duress and coercion. If left to his or hers own devices without the threat of harm, do we actually know how they would vote?
The story behind our national policies resulting from Miami politics for the past 50 years is nothing more than a family feud, but one which rivals a Greek tragedy in scope, lasting for all the ensuing generations up to today – a family feud that has disrupted the internal politics of two countries and dictated American foreign policy and US military allocation in the Caribbean for the past half-century.
So, how does one discuss the Hispanic vote in Florida, or for that matter, the nation, when no politician, the media or their pundits actually understand the variety of often conflicting interests, the history, the difference in cultures, or the demographic minutia among the US Hispanic population of which they are attempting to discuss?
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