Cuban Americans and the Democrat Prejudice Every Voter Should Know
Democrats Use Immigration as an Electoral Issue, But Shame Immigrants Who Don’t Take the Party Line
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted here with permission.
Talk to a Democrat, and their calling card is their openness, especially to immigrants. In the hands of the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris Administrations, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” became an open invite for even (or especially) non-citizens to improve their lives at the expense of America’s laws. Democrats bristle when accused of vote-garnishing-by-illegal-immigration, but their top strategists openly predict that the “browning” of America will give them a permanent majority. The conclusive test that Democrats see immigration as a political play is how they treat the mostly legal immigrants and minorities who decline to be part of their projected majority. Case in point—the Cuban American community.
For many reasons, Cuban Americans don’t fit the mold of a Democratic support group. They come from a country wrecked by statist power—big government that grew and grew until it became tyrannical. From the 1960s to the 1980s they were used by Washington intelligence agencies in Cold War politics, and in exchange they were welcomed to America at extremely high rates because of their intelligence and military value. This unusual history has allowed Cubans to avoid the fate of every other immigrant group since the Johnson Administration passed the Immigration Act of 1965, which let in a lot of different nationalities in small numbers. This strategy prevented these immigrant groups from gaining political influence and put them at the mercy of Washington administrators.
As a result, early 21st century Cuban Americans more resemble early 20th century Irish and Italian immigrants than any other ethnic group. They’re cohesive, political, and active in on-the-ground politics. They’ve made a city, Miami, their own, and have expanded to Tallahassee and Texas and West Virginia and from there to Washington. This has provoked an extraordinary amount of Liberal resentment—as well as attempts to eat away at Cuban-American influence and values by academics and commentators supported by media and nonprofit figures, some Cuban American and all tied in one way or another to the Democratic Party.
The Academic Critique: Attacking Cuban “Privilege” in the Name of Equality
The “exemplary” academic critic of Cuban Americans is Susan Eckstein, the outgoing professor of sociology at the Frederick Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Eckstein recently visited Florida International University in Miami and created a stir. The book she promoted at the event, Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America, argues that, thanks to Cold War anti-communist policies, Cubans received special immigration status vis a vis other Miami arrivals like Haitians.
Eckstein’s argument leaves a lot out: e.g. that Cubans received the same sorts of privileges as other groups involved in Washington’s foreign ventures (Ukrainians, Afghanis, Iraqis), only at a higher level because of Cuba’s threat to America during the Cold War; and that the postwar immigration system has also disproportionally “privileged” other classes of people like “high skilled” white collar workers. Eckstein’s official biography leaves a lot out, too: namely that, as an earlier Restoration report documented, she forged a career collaborating with academics linked to nonprofits sympathetic to the Cuban regime, and also collaborated with the Cuban regime itself.
Tellingly, her presence in Cuba wasn’t advertised on Boston University’s website, which tracks her events and op-eds (including the one in The Herald.) It was discovered by the intrepid tracking of Delano Cicconi, an undergraduate at FIU.
The Cultural Critique: Calling Cuban-Americans a “Less Developed” People
The anti-Cuban cultural critique of William “Billy” Corben, a well-known and respected documentarian connected to Miami political players, leaves a lot out, too. Though Corben, a Democrat, frames his politics as fighting “corruption,” "having a conversation" "opening dialogue” and “finding solutions”—his comments about Cuban Americans who vote or identify as Republican suggest a different side to his advocacy.
Here are a few of his comments. “Miami is living proof Cubans wouldn’t know what to do with democracy if they had it” and “there’s no IQ test to run for office; if there was there would just be nobody in office in Miami.” Miami politicians use "buffoonery and cheap demagoguery.” Right-wing Cubans have “this need for a sort of strict, father figure” who embodies “toxic masculinity.” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, the son of Miami’s first Cuban-American mayor, is a “mayor with a bullhorn screaming to a crowd of people”; is “not ready to be on the world stage with adults”; and is “just a little boy in his father’s suit.” Corben calls Joe Carollo, a Cuban-American city councilman, a “racist, antisemitic misogynistic wife beater” whose election proves that, in Miami, “we don’t recycle our trash we elect it.” He calls Miami “tribal,” and unfriendly to “mutual compassion and empathy.” It’s not a “free place where people are friendly and rational”; it’s one where leaders are “toying with people’s emotions,” fueling what Corben calls “fanatical passions” and “fanatical flames.” Also fueling these flames, in Corben’s telling, seems to be “Cuban exceptionalism” which he says “equals white supremacy” because (echoing Eckstein) “if you believe…that you’re superior and entitled to more rights and benefits than other immigrants and minorities, that’s discrimination.”
To get a sense of how odd Corben’s remarks are, consider the response if a respected conservative reformer argued that Democratic-supporting minorities hold their political views because they aren’t equipped for democracy and are manipulated by left-wing leaders. The institutional left would not just condemn these statements as offensive. They would also point out their dishonesty. After all, minorities who support Democrats do so because they have generally found the national government, which Democrats support, to be an engine of freedom, whereas Cubans, who support Republicans, see national governments as agents of oppression. The question isn’t who’s right. It’s why Corben’s offensive inaccuracies aren’t roundly repudiated.
Local and National Media Support the Academic and Cultural Smears
One possible reason Corben’s comments aren’t repudiated is that the Miami media and national media traffic in these inaccuracies, too. For proof, look no further than the coverage Eckstein received during her visit, during which Cuban Americans attended her talk and responded passionately—something an expert in Cuban history like Eckstein surely could have predicted. “Inevitably…the thinking stopped and the shouting started,” sighed WLRN. “Book discussion…turns into emotional rebuke,” said The Miami Herald, and went on to feature an op-ed by Eckstein “setting the record straight.” Washington Monthly ran a piece about the controversy by Joseph Contreras, a Miami Cuban whose career took him first to Newsweek and then to the U.N. Contreras described Republican Cuban-Americans as “zealous” and motivated by “bitter[ness]” to “punis[h]” politicians. He compared their responses to Eckstein to a “real-life telenovela” “excrement hit[ting] the fan” and “a Miami Dolphins home game.” He described them engaging in “raucous applause and loud whooping,” “unleash[ing] personal attacks,” “salvo launch[ing],” and creating an “overheated political climate” thanks to their “emotional and psychological scars.”
The article closed by wondering “when and if Cuban Americans will shed their overwhelming support for Republican candidates and be less animated by anticommunist, revanchist politics.” What other minority group gets cast in stereotypes, in this case conjuring the “irrationality” of the tropics, without broad-based media condemnation?
We’ve seen these types of comments, long before they came from Eckstein, Corben, andtheir fellow travelers in media. Beginning in the 1870s, as Irish and Italian immigrants came to New York, the institutional powers-that-be, mostly WASP administrators and philanthropists, were discomfited by their arrival.“Irish Catholic despotism rules the city of New York,” declared The New York Times. Corruption was alleged (“ward politics is built up out of racial, religious…affiliations, out of blood kinship; out of childhood associations, youthful comraderie, general neighborhood sociability.”) So was immaturity (“Primitive people…deep down in their hearts admire nothing so much as the [big] man”).
These labelers spoke the language of equality, and inclusivity, but their “reforms” gave themselves and their institutions (philanthropies, universities, administrative agencies) power over immigrants at the expense of representative democracy. Not coincidentally, some of these labelers also had socialist sympathies—just as the Miami media, founded by some of the same types of WASP reformers who a century ago were trying to reform the Irish and Italians, tends to support socialist elements in Miami today.
A Miami Threat and a Boston Warning
Today’s anti-Cuban-American academic, cultural, and media movers have an audience of influential fellow believers with ties to Cuban communists as well as to the Biden White House. Mostly wealthy liberal or progressive activists like Hugo Cancio and Ana Sofia Pelaez, they often surface together (and with Eckstein) supporting closer ties to Cuba and Black Lives Matter. They seem sincere about their belief that Democratic equality engineered by administrators is what’s best for the Cuban American future, rather than the rough (d)emocratic jostling for interests that characterized immigrants before 1965. But an example from the North, of Boston and its surrounding suburbs, tells a different story. There, Cuban Americans are one of a number of minorities, the only ones that lean Republican. According to one activist, Michael Reyes, who spoke to Restoration News, the “situation we’re stuck with” is slights both small and large.
On the small but meaningful side, there is the absence of any official political presence at Cuban American events, as opposed to Puerto Rican or Dominican events which are well-attended by major political players. There’s also the fact that anti-Cuban regime material can’t find its way into English-language Boston newspapers but has to be published in New Hampshire.
On the major and offensive side, there is the city’s slow-run response to the Cuban regime’s repressive crackdown of July 2021. Also, a city council resolution to lift sanctions on the Cuban regime, sponsored by a Democratic Socialist who made her bones at a nonprofit founded by Harvard’s Noam Chomsky. (Chomsky, it’s worth noting, recently wrote a book about the Cuban regime featuring an introduction by the regime’s President). This resolution enjoyed support from a wide range of Democratic players: not just Chomsky’s socialist acolyte but a city counselor who graduated from Cambridge and Harvard specializing in liberal political philosophy. Cuban-American activists like Reyes tried to persuade Boston’s councilors to walk back the resolution. But these efforts foundered at the hands of these politicians, who delayed meetings off pleadings of business, then because they “needed more information” about the issue. Eventually, Reyes told Restoration News that he suspected getting the runaround and buttonholed a moderate Democratic ally at a party: “I’m on your side,” this ‘ally’ said quietly, “but no one else will pursue it.”
Why Miami Matters
As two earlier Restoration reports have shown, Boston and its area politics are dominated by graduates of or professors at its universities, of which it has the most in the country, as well as large consultancies, liberal newspapers, and progressive activists who collect around the colleges. Miami, with its large Cuban-American population which stays true to its politics and still manages to keep growth under control, is a far cry from Boston. But Boston is a good litmus test of how Cuban-Americans will be treated when they’re not in the majority. As Reyes told Restoration News, “They don’t agree with our politics so they leave us in the cold.”
Boston reflects what a “normal” American city of ethnic groups looks like in the post-1965 immigration mode, when power gets broken between multiple small immigrant groups competing with administrators for attention. People who believe in one-size-fits-all solutions— aka government by standardization—ignore these distinct groups without consequences,. By contrast, immigrants before 1965 had the numbers and cohesion to honestly fight for their interests and their values, and set the terms for their lives. This is the actual definition of representative government in a democratic republic, and it’s what Cuban-Americans have in Miami today. Hopefully they will keep it.
But for voters at large this election year, an increasing number among them immigrants who have been moving toward the Republican camp, Democratic moves in Miami and Boston against Cuban Americans should have more immediate significance. They show that Democrats don’t care about immigrants’ independence as citizens—they care about immigrants’ votes, and they’re willing to use their control of institutions to bully and attack any group which steps out of line.