Posted on 07/14/2008 4:41:48 PM PDT by forkinsocket
On the surface, political life in Cuban Miami seems unchanged. Little Havana is still partly a Disney version of a displaced Cuba and partly a genuine community hub, where families who have long since left for suburbia still come for nostalgic weekend lunches. At the Versailles Restaurant, the community newspapers preaching no compromise with Castro are all that are on offer. For almost four decades, the Versailles has been an obligatory stop for Washington politicians courting the Cuban-American community, visits that, as photographs in the restaurant attest, have often involved putting on a white guayabera, the four-pocket dress shirt that often replaces a coat and tie in the Caribbean. This familiar theater of intransigence — a staple of South Florida life at least since the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, when C.I.A.-backed Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the new Communist regime — is ubiquitous. Some Cuban-Americans point hopefully to a softening in the Spanish-language, Cuba-focused radio outlets that now dominate the South Florida market. But for an outsider, what is striking is the degree to which the hard-line stance endures, since it might have been supposed that 50 years of failure to influence events on the island might have led to the conclusion that the hard-line position needed to be reconsidered. Most officeholders in Florida and, for that matter, most national politicians continue to at least pay lip service to the dream of a post-Communist Cuba, even though, early this year, Fidel Castro succeeded in seamlessly handing over power to his brother Raúl — testimony, if any was needed, to the stability of the regime.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
the nyt hopes that american cubans switch parties; there’s no evidence.
the author is the son of susan sontag.
They will stay red.
Is this surprising from the newspaper that made Fidel Castro?
Do Cubans think the Party that spirited Elian Gonzales back to the “Communist Paradise” is going to stand up to the Castro family? Why would anyone who opposes socialist and communist dictators vote Democrat?
Human nature will take its toll. As people forget what a communist looks like, as they forget the damage unlimited government can do, as they are conditioned to look more and more toward government solutions rather than to their own resources, the Dems will look more and more inviting.
Most news outlets are DNC dominated, and this includes most spanish language news outlets. Most schools and universities are a marxist swamp; most public education is shot through with socialist presumptions. That means in the war of ideas, our opponents control the infrastructure of the battlefield almost completely.
Conservatives and Republicans in general need to solve that problem or they’ve elected their last majority.
The cuban community will go blue, unfortunately. Here on the west coast I have no special insight, btw, its just that the Dems have the politics of ethnicity down to a science, there’s now way the GOP can compete with them (try as they may).
I only read the first page and when I saw there were 4 more from the NY Times, it didn’t seem worth the effort. Did they mention anywhere in the article that Cubans are no longer the dominant Hispanic group in FL? They are a minority as of fairly recently, so I suspect that has more to do with why there may be a swing toward the Democrats in voting patterns than Cubans suddenly deciding they like Fidel and the Democrats’ policies.
Versailles is also the name of a chain of Cuban restaurants in Los Angeles. They are especially well-known for their garlic chicken.
American Cubans are still the largest voting minority group and we are very Republican.
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