Following McCain, Obama Courts Cuban Voters in Miami. Do They Feel the Amor?

MIAMI, Fla.--Politics, as they say, is local--and in Miami, that means Cuban. "Cuba is everything here," a local lawyer told me last night. "Then you leave and you never hear about it again."
 
Unless, of course, it's an election year. With Florida up for grabs in November--and the Cuban Independence Day celebrations in full effect--Miami's Cuban-American community had the honor (or the burden) of hosting two of the three remaining presidential candidates this week.  First it was presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, who went from moderate to macho in Tuesday's tough-talking remarks (then swigged some Cuban coffee at Cafe Versailles). And not to be left out, Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama followed suit this afternoon with a "major address on Latin America" before the exiles of the Cuban American National Foundation.

Obama's was the tougher crowd. Although CANF president Francisco Hernandez said in his opening remarks that his group, once the foremost voice representing the Cuban exile cause in Washington, was not "partisan but patriotic, not red or blue or black or white," its members have long gravitated toward Republicans--much like the Cuban community as a whole, which voted for Bush three-to-one in 2000 and 2004 and so far this cycle is said to prefer McCain (or even Hillary Clinton) to the senator from Illinois. With McCain having spent much of Tuesday's speech questioning his rival's foreign-policy cojones--"I want to give hope to the Cuban people, not to the Castro regime"--Obama was facing an even steeper climb.

His approach? Head on. As the crowd noshed on pork chops, sweet potato mash and asparagus, Obama delivered a sugar-coated speech that nonetheless contained some relatively bitter pills--at least for the hardest of hard-liners who form the backbone of Miami's exile community. First was Obama's promise to "immediately allow unlimited family travel and remittances to the island"--a plan that many anti-Castro types see as an unacceptable softening of stance. More important, however, was his position toward current Cuban leader Raul Castro: meeting "without preconditions." At first, the candidate was defensive. "John McCain’'s been going around the country talking about how much I want to meet with Raul Castro," he said. "As if I’'m looking for a social gathering. As if I want to have tea time. That'’s never what I’'ve said, and John McCain knows it." But ultimately Obama reiterated his support for "direct diplomacy, with friend and foe alike, without preconditions"--even as he elaborated on his stance by calling (as he has in recent weeks) for "careful preparation" and "a clear agenda" as well. "Unlike John McCain, I would never, ever, rule out a course of action that could advance the cause of liberty," he said. With no explicit mention of meeting with Castro himself--Obama euphemistically said he would "lead that diplomacy" instead--it was a message calibrated for the crowd. But the old guard undoubtedly sensed "heresy" and found it hard to swallow.

That said, Obama's relative boldness was as much about politics as principle. In reality, Cuban hardliners will vote Republican no matter what--meaning the candidate was targeting their more moderate children instead. Among younger (albeit less engaged) Cuban-Americans, relaxing travel restrictions to the island is a popular plan now officially backed by CANF, which had until recently disagreed; it's seen as a way not only to reunite families but also to help weaken internal support for the regime. With that in mind, Team Obama hopes to peel off five, 10, 15 percent of Florida's 500,000 Cuban-American voters--an important gain in a state decided by 537 ballots in 2000. To do so, the senator can actually afford to offend more Cuban-Americans than previous Democratic candidates. The reason? Demographics. In 1988, Cuban-Americans made up 90 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida, according to the Miami-based polling firm Bendixen & Associates; twenty years later, that number has dwindled to 45 percent, thanks to an influx of immigrants from elsewhere in the Americas. That explains why Obama was willing to cross some traditional lines--and why he spent at least half of his speech discussing Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico and his broader Latin America policy. In Florida, there are other Latino votes to be won now.

Still, when in Miami, do as the Miamians do. After starting his speech with the usual litany of "thank you's" and waiting for the applause to die down, Obama paused for a moment to apologize for monopolizing the mic. "That's my job today," he said. "But this is just a hello. It's not goodbye. In the next few months, I'm going to be spending a lot of time listening to the people here." With that, he turned to the teleprompter and launched into his prepared remarks.