New voters will cast out anti-Castroites, says Álvaro Fernández
By Gerardo Arreola
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
HAVANA – A key to the solution to the dispute between Cuba and the United States lies in a future scenario where a coalition of Latin Americans and Caribbeans in Florida will displace the generations of politicians who remained “frozen” in stubborn opposition to any dealing with the island, says Álvaro Fernández, journalist and researcher, who follows the topic closely.
Those new electoral trends will propel leaders and legislators “with a new mindset” that will include a favorable attitude to a normal relationship with Cuba, the analyst states in an interview with La Jornada.
An American of Cuban origin, Fernández participates in the Miami Progressive Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes the registration of Latin voters and studies their trends. In addition, he edits the bilingual electronic magazine Progreso Weekly, based in that city.
In Havana, Fernández spoke at a recent forum of the Superior Institute of International Relations – Cuba’s diplomatic academy – about the future of the conflict between Havana and Washington during Barack Obama’s second term, beginning this week.
The non-Cuban Latin vote is growing in Florida with an “unstoppable” tendency and will be decisive in the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, mostly because of the growing number of Puerto Ricans. “I call this factor ‘the giant who roared’ in the elections two months ago,” Fernández says. “It is a giant who will grow in the near future.”
The Cubans who have arrived in the United States in the past 30 years tend to register to vote and do so to advance their own interests, “among them the need to visit and help their families on the island,” while the old generations disappear “via the natural route,” the specialist points out.
In addition, the Cuban vote has been gradually turning toward the Democratic Party since 1988, Fernández says. He recalls that 860,000 Cubans now live in Miami, of whom more than 300,000 arrived after 1994 and have (for the most part) not adopted U.S. citizenship. Of those who gained U.S. citizenship, only 35 percent are registered voters.
According to a Bendixen poll, 48 percent of Cuban-Americans voted for Obama last November. But even more important than the numbers, Fernández maintains, is a projection of what has been happening since 1988: an increase in the Latin vote for the Democrats, particularly in Florida, where Dominican, Mexican and Haitian immigration is also growing.
The researcher explains that about 840,000 Puerto Ricans reside in Florida, many of whom moved down from New York. A majority have resettled in the state’s central region, along an axis that connects the cities of Orlando and Tampa. Within three years, they will number more than the Cubans who are registered to vote.
Mexicans are the third most important group in New York. In Florida, they are increasing in numbers, attracted by farm work.
“Where is all this leading us to?” Fernández asks. “To Cubans like me, in Florida, who have to seek alliances with the new Latin American groups [in the state] because they believe they have to establish relations with Cuba.”
Citing numbers from memory and combining them with other data he carries in a notebook, Fernández paints the electoral map in Florida, showing that Democrats of Mexican, Colombian and Venezuelan origin have defeated Republicans of Cuba descent.
“Quietly, these things are changing the state’s electoral landscape,” he says. “It is a growing snowball.”
The emblematic case, he says, is that of Joe García, a Democrat of Cuban origin, former director of the anti-Castro Cuban-American National Foundation and at one time very close to the organization’s founder, Jorge Mas Canosa.
Last November, García defeated the ultraconservative David Rivera for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He conducted a campaign based on Miami’s urban affairs but took a position favorable to contact between Cuban families on both shores of the Straits of Florida.
