Cuban Americans have a distinct choice in November. It’s Biden.

For over 50 years, I have watched self-serving politicians cunningly exploit the pain and suffering of the Cuban-American voter in South Florida just to get elected. A few derogatory terms followed by hateful and destructive policies aimed at Cuba and its citizens calculated to aggravate misery, hunger and pain throughout the island, they tell us, will surely incite the people to rise up, revolt and overthrow the Cuban government.

The sad reality is that, while this approach did succeed in winning many of our votes, it failed to advance the cause of positive change in Cuba.

President Barack Obama was the first U.S. president whose approach to Cuba threatened to upend the co-dependent relationship between hardliners in Cuba and the United States.

On March 21, 2016, Obama traveled to Havana not just to bury the last remnants of the Cold War, but to cultivate the seeds of change within Cuba.

In front of a stunned audience, throughout the island and beyond, Obama challenged the Cuban youth to “look to the future … that they can choose, shape and build,” in a call for them to help transition the Cuban economy and government. Then, he steeled his resolve, looked directly at Raul Castro and said, “Citizens should be free to speak their minds without fear, to organize, to criticize their own government” and challenged the Cuban President to “not fear the different voices of the Cuban people and their capacity to meet and assemble.”

Words like these had never been spoken by a foreign head of state on Cuban soil before. His was a message of engagement placing the Cuban people as the protagonists of their own future.

Obama’s words inspired me to return to Cuba in 2016, 56 years after I left. My 2016 journey to the land of my birth was so enlightening, that I returned again in 2017 and 2019 to travel the length of the island and meet as many of Cuba’s new young entrepreneurs, as possible, as they responded to Obama’s challenge, and breathed his oxygen.

I found that a new phrase dominated Cuban life everywhere I visited. Everyone hoped and waited for el cambio

(change). The young accountant, Pedro, who I met in Havana in 2016, grew his nascent company so well that by 2018, he had bought two homes from his profits; one to move into and one to use as his office. In 2019, he was looking to start a branch office in Camaguey; he had thirty-five employees.

On the same trip, I met another young Cuban entrepreneur named Maidel, who earned enough in savings to buy two homes near Holguin, one into which he moved with his wife and small child and one he now rents as a bed and breakfast.

Osvaldo bought a ranch to raise cattle and horses in Ciego de Avila during 2016 and sold the beef directly to private restaurants in Camaguey. In 2017, he bought the adjacent land from the government to plant vegetables and raise pheasants destined for the new five star hotels in Havana.

Like Pedro, Maidel, and Osvaldo, there were thousands of new private businesses created in Cuba between 2016-2018 that tasted financial success through ingenuity and hard work, before President Trump impetuously ended Obama’s Policy. These young neo-capitalists yearn for Trump’s leash to be removed so they can resume their private business success stories.

Add to this, the advent of the internet, social media and cell phone service in Cuba, and a new Cuban Constitution guaranteeing the right to own private businesses and properties, and it is no secret that the Cuban government today is well aware that they are losing the Cuban youth to Obama’s oxygen and the hopes of

el cambio.

As a result, they have indicated their willingness to negotiate the next steps to Obama’s Rapprochement Policy, even if it means that topics that were off the negotiating table in 2016, are no longer taboo.

This is the opportunity we have been waiting to influence generational change in Cuba. Unfortunately, President Trump is deaf. Joe Biden is not.

On Nov. 3, Cuban-Americans have a distinct choice: we can elect Joe Biden, who will work tirelessly to empower the Cuban people and advance the cause of human rights, or we can allow a reelected Trump to continue to take advantage of our community, for his own gain. Mario Cartaya is CEO of Cartaya and Associates Architects, a Fort Lauderdale firm he founded 41 years ago. Originally from Cuba, he arrived to the U.S. with his parents in 1960.

We can elect Joe Biden, who will work tirelessly to empower the Cuban people and advance the cause of human rights, or we can allow a reelected Trump to continue to take advantage of our community, for his own gain.