POLITICS

Cuban-American Evolution

Miami Democrats believe that they finally have a real shot at three Republican-held House seats.

by S.V. Date

Sat. May 3, 2008


Nearly a half-century after the Cuban revolution, old age's in-exorable march on Fidel Castro in Havana and his most implacable foes 90 miles north in Little Havana is finally time-warping Miami politics into the new millennium--and perhaps giving Democrats a shot at three perennially Republican congressional seats.

Democrats--from local activists to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee--argue that a majority of South Florida's Cuban-American voters, long a die-hard GOP voting bloc, today are more interested in health care, the economy, and the war in Iraq than "The Bearded One" and his brother/successor, Raul.

"The Castro regime is coming to its biological conclusion. Succession among 70- and 80-year-olds is not the future," says Joe Garcia, former director of the Cuban American National Foundation and one of three Democratic challengers for the seats. "The same thing is happening in South Florida. You're entering a transformational moment."

Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who is seeking his fourth term in a district that stretches across the bottom of the state into Naples, laughs and calls such talk "wishful thinking by the radical Left," and then reads aloud a similar analysis from The Miami Herald. "You know when that was written? That was written November 10, 1985."

Regardless of whether the Democrats' dreams of flipping a trio of South Florida seats are mere wishful thinking, the three Cuban-Americans now holding them will for the first time since their arrivals in Washington face well-funded challenges. In 11 of their combined 21 general elections since 1989, the incumbents were unopposed by a Democratic challenger. This time, they all face Democrats who, if first-quarter filings are a good indicator, may be able to match them dollar for dollar.

Garcia is taking on Diaz-Balart in Florida's 25th Congressional District. Colombia-born businesswoman Annette Taddeo is challenging nine-term Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican, in the 18th. But the marquee matchup will probably be the one pitting Mario's elder brother, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, against Raul Martinez, the larger-than-life former mayor of Hialeah, the majority-Cuban-American city that anchors the 21st District.

All three Democrats out-raised the incumbents by small margins in the first quarter of this year, with Taddeo making a $180,000 personal loan to her campaign to add to her $26,000 advantage in donations. All three Republicans, however, sit on larger campaign accounts, thanks to money carried over from the previous election.

Eight-term veteran Lincoln Diaz-Balart says that he and his Republican colleagues also share the advantage of having long served their districts and having continually taken a hard line against the Castro regime. Rules governing Americans' travel to Cuba were tightened by a 2004 presidential order at the urging of the Diaz-Balart brothers and their allies. "I am very proud of my fight for human rights in Cuba and elsewhere. I'm not going to apologize for it," the elder brother says.

Such comments bring the obligatory taunt from his challenger, Martinez. "Lincoln wants to be president of Cuba. That's the whole issue: Cuba, Cuba, Cuba." Then he adds: "If he's so confident, why is he hiding? Let's go at it. I'll have a mano a mano with him anytime, anywhere."

If such back-and-forth seems odd to much of America, it is commonplace in Miami, where waves of Cuban refugees reshaped the political scene in 1959 and the early '60s. Originally loyal to Democrats, thanks to President Johnson's Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, Miami's exile community became staunchly Republican in the early 1980s when then-County Chairman Jeb Bush aggressively registered them as they walked out from their citizenship ceremonies, and Ronald Reagan won their hearts with his clear and simple anti-communism.

Even as the world transformed, however, Miami politics did not. Pipe bombings of opponents of the economic embargo of Cuba continued into the late 1980s. In 1983, the city of Miami officially declared "Orlando Bosch Day" to fete the man considered by U.S. intelligence officials to have masterminded the 1976 downing of a Cuban airliner with 73 people on board. In 1990, Bosch was freed from prison, thanks to Bush's lobbying of his father's White House and legal representation by Raoul Cantero, a grandson of Fulgencio Batista, the dictator toppled by Castro.

Castro's ouster of Batista, in fact, continues to drive much of the unspoken back story of Miami's politics, which sometimes have seemed less about opposition to dictatorship than about a preference for the previous dictator, who fled Havana on January 1, 1959. The Diaz-Balart brothers' father, for instance, was speaker of the Cuban House of Representatives and a Batista ally--as well as the brother of Fidel Castro's first wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart.

Garcia says those complicated family ties might help explain the congressional brothers' support for a policy that now limits Cuban-Americans to one island visit every three years--and then only to see immediate family. "Their vision is vengeance, not justice," says Garcia, who opposes the limits as needlessly cruel to aged Cuban-Americans and their relatives still on the island. "I think the suffering of someone's grandmother is not going to lead to Cuba being free any sooner."

Recent polls suggest that two-thirds of Cuban-Americans oppose the tighter travel rules, as do the Democratic challengers. But what gives Miami Democratic consultants even more hope is that the polls also show that as an issue Cuba ranks below the economy, gasoline prices, health insurance, and the Iraq war. They even have living proof: El Bombero, Democrat Luis Garcia, Miami Beach's first Cuban-American firefighter, who in 2006 was elected to a Little Havana state House seat by 52 percent to 48 percent. That seat had been Republican for decades. And that part of the state was carried by Republican Charlie Crist in that year's gubernatorial election.

Luis Garcia's election "was really an eye-opening experience for us," recalls Democratic consultant Freddy Balsera. He and a colleague trekked to Washington to visit newly empowered House Democrats last year and to share those numbers as well as voter-registration trends showing an uptick in Democrats coinciding with an influx of non-Cuban Hispanics. They also took along perhaps their most powerful evidence that strong Democratic challengers could topple the trio of House Republicans: November 2006 results in which the lawmakers posted their weakest re-election numbers, despite running against relative unknowns with almost no money.

The trend is best seen in Ros-Lehtinen's district, where, after four straight elections with no Democratic opponent, she has faced a low-profile Democrat in each of the past three cycles. Her victory margin has dwindled from 41 points in 2002 to 30 points in 2004 and 24 points in 2006.

She can, nevertheless, still boast of taking more than 60 percent of the vote--a threshold that neither Diaz-Balart brother cracked in 2006, even though their opponents were similarly underfunded neophytes. And, ironically, of the three, Ros-Lehtinen has the least Republican seat. It was previously held by Florida Democratic legend Claude Pepper. She won it in a 1989 special election upon his death and has been re-elected ever since, even in a district that today stretches south through Miami's more liberal Anglo suburbs and all the way down the Keys. The Diaz-Balart brothers, in contrast, won in districts that they essentially drew for themselves as state legislators after the 1992 and 2002 reapportionments.

"I think Ileana, to her credit, has done a better job of maintaining a presence in her district," says Democrat Balsera.

A more intriguing result was in Lincoln Diaz-Balart's 2006 race: Democrat Frank Gonzalez spent just $16,598 compared with the incumbent's $926,106, yet won 41 percent of the vote. Gonzalez actually defeated Diaz-Balart in less Hispanic Broward County, which accounts for a fraction of the district, but lost nearly 2-to-1 in Miami-Dade County.

"Lincoln won Hialeah 5-to-1," Martinez notes. "If it wasn't for Hialeah, Lincoln would have been in trouble.... Now he's going to have to compete with me, having been mayor of Hialeah for 24 years."

DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland agrees that it was the Diaz-Balarts' relative weakness that caught his eye: "Clearly, the fact that in the past election that they didn't get these big votes was one factor."

The DCCC served notice on the Republican incumbents last October with a week's worth of drive-time radio ads slamming Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers for their votes against expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. "I think their calculation was that because of the position they took on Cuba, they could ignore all the domestic policy concerns of their constituents," Van Hollen says.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart calls that description a "partisan caricature" and points to his work on last year's comprehensive immigration reform bill, on funding for Interstate 75 in Broward County, and on securing $100 million to keep the U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Miami. "I feel really good about this year," he says.

The two sides further dispute what effects the House contests might have on the presidential race and, eventually, on U.S.-Cuban relations. Democrats hope that on-the-ground campaigns will give cover to the Democratic presidential nominee on easing sanctions. Republicans scoff at that notion and suggest that vigorous congressional campaigns might have the unintended consequence of boosting turnout for John McCain. "If this is the Democratic strategy, I think it's at odds with their presidential strategy," says National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma. He, too, says that the challengers in South Florida don't worry him. "This isn't 2006," he says. "I frankly don't think that any of these three will be on anybody's vulnerable list."

That could change soon, given the Democrats' proven fundraising ability, says David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report. Of the three seats, Lincoln Diaz-Balart's is the one most likely to make the watch list first, given Martinez's established base of support. "Right now looks like a good time for Democrats to make a play for these districts," Wasserman says. "If there's any year that the Democrats can go on the offense, it's this one."

Bring it on, says Mario Diaz-Balart, who predicts he will "win big" and teach his challenger a lesson: "I think, frankly, he's going to have a rude awakening--like all my opponents have had--come November."

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