Cubans make last push to reelect Trump
On the spur of the moment, a singer in a Cuban salsa band had an idea for a lyric to please fellow Trump supporters at a Miami birthday party.
Tirso Luis Paez flicked his hand so his band mates would let him take over during a crowd favorite, “Cuba is Me,” and instead of singing the usual chorus, he belted out: “Yo voy a votar, por Donald Trump!”
The seemingly spontaneous moment with Los 3 de la Habana was livestreamed and soon viewed by tens of thousands. The Trump campaign quickly featured it in a national ad projecting Miami Cuban enthusiasm for the Republican leader to Latino markets across the country.
Florida’s Cuban American voters remain a bright spot in Trump’s effort to retain his winning coalition from 2016. Polls show his strong support from these key voters may even be growing to include the younger Cuban Americans that Democrats once considered their best hope of breaking the GOP’s hold. For Trump, that support could prove essential in a tight race in a state he must win to beat Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
In the past four years, Trump has courted with these voters by undoing former President Barack Obama’s Cuba engagement
policy, sanctioning LatinAmerican socialist governments and misleadingly casting all Democrats as leftists and anti- capitalists.
“Anything that smells like socialism to us, the slightest thing already makes us sick. We start shaking,” said Paez, who like many exiled Cubans accuses the island’s Communist leaders of oppressing its people and failing to lift them out of poverty.
“Many people could identify with us in that video,” Paez said.
Four years later, Democrat Hillary Clinton found some support among Cuban Americans put off by Tr ump’s unpredictable style. She won Miami-Dade County by 30 percentage points. Still, she narrowly lost the state to Trump.
A Florida International University poll of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County released this month shows Trump leading Biden 59% to 25%. The same poll showed Trump leading among young Cubans, unlike in 2016.