Post-Castro Florida
Guillermo MartÃnez opines in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel about the impact of the Cuban vote in the 2008 election. In the process, he makes the point that the Hispanic vote in Florida is far from monolithic:
Cuban Americans are no longer a majority of the Hispanic vote in the state of Florida. Of the estimated one million Hispanic voters in the state (15 percent of those who vote regularly in the state), more than 550,000 are Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, South American, Central Americans, and Mexicans. Many of them live in Broward or Central Florida and care little, if at all, for Cuba politics.
Democrats in the state must have learned the lesson by now that they cannot try to out hard-line Republicans on Cuba. For even if they do, it will not get them many of the traditional rock-solid Cuban-American Republican voters.
Political analysts in the state know that South Florida’s Cuban-American community will give a Republican candidate for president an overwhelming majority of its vote. They also know that among other Hispanic groups in the state, Cuban politics is not a visceral issue, as it is for Miami’s Cuban-Americans.
Hispanics in the state voted for former governor Jeb Bush twice and for his brother once. They, in contrast to Cuban-Americans, are not a one issue group of voters. They will be one of the most important groups of swing voters in the state, for they do not have strong commitments to either party.
They are more interested in what to do about Iraq, in the state of the economy, in universal health care, in education, and even the non-Puerto Ricans, in immigration. Cuba, however, is not the hot-button issue. They may even have strong opinions on the subject, but it is not the topic that will take them to the ballot box to vote for a particular candidate.
