Politicians will always be politicians…so as it goes, Newt Gingrich is reaching out to the hispanic community to assure a victory in Florida…the hispanic vote will be necessary for Gingrich to win in Florida…the hispanic population has been hit hard during these difficult economic times…Gingrich is hoping that the hispanic community will rally up and send a message to Washington…that it’s time for a change…again..Can Florida be the spring-board Gingrich needs to the White House?
pass it on,
Dr Anthony
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made a short stop at the Versailles coffee shop in Miami’s Little Havana recently. It has a reputation for good pastries and strong, sweet, dark Cuban coffee, but Gingrich was not stopping just to sample the fare.
He was there to persuade Cuban hardliners that he has not gone soft on the Castro brothers. If the Versailles clientele are anything to go by, the tactic seems to be working.
Juan Santana, a 53-year-old security guard, born in Cuba but living in exile in Florida since 1974, was among those so taken by Gingrich that he went on to support the candidate at a campaign event this week in Miami.
Santana is about as hardline as it gets, viewing Castro’s Cuba as “satanic communism” and a terrorist entity which he says is working with Iranian intelligence agents. He sports a military-style cap embroidered with the legend “Operation Mongoose Cuban Readiness Force” in a tribute to a CIA operation dating back to the 1960s to overthrow Castro. He was accompanied by about half a dozen others wearing similar caps.
Cuban-Americans remain a powerful political force in southern Florida and Gingrich and his rival Mitt Romney are going all out to court a group that could prove decisive in a tight race. Both were in Miami on Wednesday seeking to win over Cuban-Americans and other Latino voters and both will be back again today, speaking at a major Latino leadership conference. Both are backing up their campaign with Spanish language ads.
Florida’s Latinos account for about 20% of the population, with Cuban-Americans the biggest grouping, followed by those of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent. Of the 368,000 registered Republicans in Miami-Dade county, about 75% are Cuban-Americans and they turn out to vote in large numbers. The man who captures this section of the vote is likely to take the state.
According to the polls, Romney is more likely to be that man. A poll for the Spanish-language channel Univision and ABC on Wednesday gave him a 15-point lead over Gingrich among likely Hispanic voters. But there are signs that Gingrich is closing the gap, and it is the Cuban-Americans who are fuelling that movement.
Little Havana is rundown and seedy now. Many Cubans have moved out to more affluent areas to be replaced by other, poorer Latino groups. But the cigar shops, bars and restaurants remain, as do the anti-Castro monuments and murals.
Gingrich is getting advice from a strategist who helped Marco Rubio, one of the rising stars of the Republican party, to victory in the Senate, and he has tapped into the mood better than Romney. Although he was forced to drop an ad saying Romney was anti-immigrant, Gingrich’s language is much more belligerent towards the Castro brothers than Romney’s. Gingrich has also reversed his previous support for Barack Obama’s easing of the Cuban embargo and is now opposed.
On Wednesday, at a meeting on a university campus in Miami, Gingrich called for a “Cuban spring” and US support for non-military covert action to bring down the Castro brothers.
Santana, who lives in Hialeah, outside Miami, applauded this. A Republican who will be voting in Tuesday’s primary, he likes Romney but prefers Gingrich. “I am going to support Gingrich because I think he will be the best president for America at this time because of the threat of terrorism from Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.”
A cigar tucked in his pocket and on his shirt a Gingrich campaign badge ‘Don’t Believe The Liberal Media’, Santana said he does not believe the resolve of the exiles has weakened. He himself is as staunch as ever.
“Castro has done a lot of damage to Cuba. He has destroyed our values as a Judeo-Christian nation through satanic communism.”
Romney arrived in Florida at the start of the week with a better organisation and more money in place in the state than Gingrich. He has won the endorsement of many Latino Republican politicians.
But he has a huge disadvantage. In order to pander to rightwing white conservatives in the presidential debates, he took a tougher line than Gingrich on illegal immigration. While Gingrich risked alienating those white Republicans by backing what he called a humane approach to illegal immigrants, Romney said he would veto the Dream Act, which offers a route to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
In an interview with Univision, Romney insisted he was not anti-immigrant but pro-immigrant. He even joked about his father being born in Mexico. He could not claim he was Mexican-American, much as he would like to in a Florida primary, he said, as people would see through that as dishonest, but he joked that it would help if Univision was to put that label about.
Romney, with the support of Rubio, forced Gingrich this week to drop an ad saying he was anti-immigrant. The ad might have gone but the sense that Romney, unlike Gingrich, is not sympathetic enough to Latinos lingers on.
Santana, like many other Latinos, wants a route to citizenship for illegal immigrants: “The Dream Act is important. I believe it should be a humane policy. I came as a refugee. As long as they are decent, they should be allowed to stay.”
Academics argue younger people do not share their parents’ and grandparents’ passionate hatred of Castro. There is support among many of the younger generation for Obama’s policy of easing the embargo on Cuba. For many young Cuban-Americans, the overriding concerns are the same as Americans elsewhere: jobs, tuition fees and other economic worries.
Mercedes Chavez, 20, a pre-med biology major at Florida International University and a Republican, has not made up her mind who to vote for but is leaning towards Romney. The top issue for her is education. Chavez, who is of Puerto Rican, Cuban and Mexican descent, said: “Cuba is not an issue. It is not my top priority when it comes to my heritage.”
Another of the younger generation of Latino Republicans, John Partridge, 26, echoes this. Partridge, who is of Puerto Rican descent and is leaning towards Gingrich, feels the economy is what matters. “For my generation Cuba is not as big an issue as it was for the older generation … It has been 50 years.”
But not all Republican students are indifferent to the island lying 100 miles to the south. A student at Florida International University, Hector Lans, 20, a Cuban-American, has not made up his mind who to vote for on Tuesday, but said the economy is his immediate concern. But that does not mean he does not also care about Cuba. “Cuba is about the same for me as the economy,” he said.
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