Will Little Havana Go Blue?

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On the surface, political life in Cuban Miami seems unchanged. Little Havana is still partly a Disney version of a displaced Cuba and partly a genuine community hub, where families who have long since left for suburbia still come for nostalgic weekend lunches. At the Versailles Restaurant, the community newspapers preaching no compromise with Castro are all that are on offer. For almost four decades, the Versailles has been an obligatory stop for Washington politicians courting the Cuban-American community, visits that, as photographs in the restaurant attest, have often involved putting on a white guayabera, the four-pocket dress shirt that often replaces a coat and tie in the Caribbean. This familiar theater of intransigence — a staple of South Florida life at least since the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, when C.I.A.-backed Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the new Communist regime — is ubiquitous. Some Cuban-Americans point hopefully to a softening in the Spanish-language, Cuba-focused radio outlets that now dominate the South Florida market. But for an outsider, what is striking is the degree to which the hard-line stance endures, since it might have been supposed that 50 years of failure to influence events on the island might have led to the conclusion that the hard-line position needed to be reconsidered. Most officeholders in Florida and, for that matter, most national politicians continue to at least pay lip service to the dream of a post-Communist Cuba, even though, early this year, Fidel Castro succeeded in seamlessly handing over power to his brother Raúl — testimony, if any was needed, to the stability of the regime.
Yet if Cuban Miami does indeed continue to dream, it is also beginning, quietly, tentatively and painfully, to adjust. Backstage, something very new is happening. Call it the Miami Spring, or Cuban-American glasnost. This community that has clung for decades to its certainties — about the island itself, about the role the exile community would play after the Castro brothers passed from the scene, about where Cuban-Americans should situate themselves in terms of U.S. domestic politics — is in ferment. This matters not only in terms of the destiny of the Cuban-American community itself but also in terms of the 2008 elections since, despite claims made on background by some of Barack Obama’s advisers, Florida is likely to play a pivotal role in determining whether Obama or John McCain becomes president, and the Cuban-American vote is likely to play its usual outsize role in deciding which candidate prevails in the state.

In the past, both Democratic and Republican contenders tried to conform to the hard-line expectations they perceived as the overwhelming consensus within the Cuban-American community. But Obama has recently strayed from orthodoxy by criticizing aspects of the American embargo on Cuba and asserting that he is prepared to open talks with the regime. This might seem like a golden opportunity for McCain to solidify his hold on the Cuban-American vote, but Obama’s views appear to be resonating in Cuban Miami more than anyone could have predicted. Two Democratic Congressional candidates in the Miami area — Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez — were added last month to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of potential “red to blue” conversions, bringing to 37 the number of seats nationally that the Democrats hope to flip away from the Republicans. For the first time, the hard-line consensus is being challenged. There is real debate in Cuban Miami these days about the embargo, above all about the series of further restrictions that were imposed by the Bush administration in 2003 and 2004. These limited travel for so-called people-to-people educational exchanges, abolished the category of “fully hosted” travel (under which travel to and from Cuba was underwritten by non-U.S. citizens and which Washington long suspected of being a scheme for money-laundering), reduced family visits to once every three years and limited the sending of money from Cubans or Cuban-Americans living in the United States to the sender’s immediate family — parents, siblings, children — rather than, as before, to his or her extended family. A decade ago, support for such restrictions and any other confrontational policy was a certainty in Cuban South Florida. So was its domestic corollary: dependable support for Republicans both locally and nationally. Today, and quite suddenly, that unwavering support for Republicans is no longer a given.

Even sudden change has roots, and this is true in South Florida. Eduardo Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College and himself a Democrat, told me recently: “This community was always a great deal more politically diverse than it was given credit for. And Cubans have always been more socially liberal than their voting patterns might suggest.” The architect Raúl Rodríguez — whom I accompanied on a number of family visits to the island in the early 1990s and who has been involved in civic affairs in South Florida for many years — put it more sharply: “This community has always been caricatured.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/magazine/13CUBANS-t.html?th&emc=th