Member-only story
There are Republicans and there are Republicans
At least on some of policy issues, Cuban Americans do not see eye-to-eye with today’s Republican Party. The question is, can the Democrats take advantage of the misalignment?
by Guillermo J. Grenier
March 19, 2021 (OnCuba News)
“There are Cubans and there are Cubans.” With this phrase, sociologist Lisandro Perez and I cryptically signaled the diversity evident in the Cuban American population in the United States in one of our books years ago. It is a population, after all, that has continued to replenish itself with new arrivals and off-springs. It is a population that varies on the reasons its members left the homeland as well as on how way that they have been welcomed and incorporated into the U.S. socio/economic terrain. There are Cubans and there are Cubans. Some rich, some poor. Some eternally bitter, others eternally hopeful. Some feeling at home in the adopted country, others feeling alienated from friends, family and future.
In the last column, I examined how these varieties of Cuban Americans managed to make a home, a noisy, argumentative Cuban home in the Republican party. In looking deeper into the pool of Cuban American Republicans and their policy preferences, I again find diversity. One way of putting it is that there are Republicans and there are Republicans.
The 2020 FIU Cuba Poll established that South Florida Cuban Americans are, on the whole, moderate Republicans when specific issues are discussed, regardless of their operatic and over-the-top Trumpian performances.
A data set developed by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group and the University of California-Los Angeles allows us to examine more closely the attitudes of South Florida Cuban Americans and compare their political policy views to those of other Republicans. The
