Cuban-American voters are split by attitudes and generations

Humberto Alvarez was nine-years-old when his family left home in Havana and set off for the United States.

It was 1962, three years after Fidel Castro led his triumphant guerrilla army into Havana, and Alvarez still has the passport that was stamped "void" by an official as he left Cuba for the last time.

“I would never go back,” he says in Spanish-inflected English, sipping coffee outside the Café Versailles, a popular Cuban haunt in Miami’s Little Havana district.

“When I came to this country, my mother and father had to return everything to the Communists. For me Cuba is only bad memories.”

His friend Raoul Lopez – who, at 78, is 20 years older than Alvarez – nods in agreement.

The two men speak only Spanish together and they move mainly in Cuban circles in Miami, but after spending most of their lives here they feel disconnected from their country of their birth.

"It's like Germany and Russia after the Communists," says Lopez. "The people that grew up in that system, they have no values – they are liars, cheaters. It's a different mentality."

Alvarez and Lopez, who worked as jewellers for much of their lives in Miami, belong to the first generation of post-revolution Cuban-Americans.

For this generation, marked by the experience of emigration, support for the embargo of Cuba and the tough American stance towards the Castro regime have always been articles of faith.

Alvarez regards the warming relations between the US and Cuba under President Barack Obama with outright hostility.

“He’s making fun of us,” he says of Obama. “He’s not going to get nothing out of it either.” Lopez chimes in. “Not a change of government. No freedom. Nothing.”

Similarly, like many of their generation, Alvarez and Lopez are lifelong Republican voters, having been drawn to the party by its strong anti-Communist position and Ronald Reagan’s firm anti-Castro stance.

Notwithstanding some misgivings about Donald Trump, they have no intention of switching sides now.

“Trumpy all the way!” Alvarez declares. “I wouldn’t say I’m 100 per cent satisfied with him, but I think he can do a better job than her. Anybody could do better than her.”

‘He don’t lie’

For Lopez, Trump’s appeal lies in his business background and unvarnished public persona.

“I don’t feel he’s a bad person. I think he’s straightforward. The main thing is he don’t lie. He’s not like a politician – they tell you whatever you like,” he says. Clinton, in contrast, is “a liar and corrupt”.

Little Havana can feel like a step into another time and place. In the dark, musty cigar shops and the barber shops on Calle Ocho, the road that cuts through the district, Spanish is the only spoken language and Cuban music plays constantly in the background.

But changes are afoot among Miami’s Cuban-Americans. As the profile of the community has changed with more recent waves of migrants and the rise of a new, American-born generation, some of the old political certainties have begun to fade.

"Those who came in the 1960s are really a product of the cold war, but today you see a very significant generational shift in terms of attitudes towards US policy on Cuba," says Prof Eduardo Gamarra, a political scientist at Florida International University who tracks Hispanic attitudes.

This shift has been mirrored by an evolution in party preferences. Where once the Republican Party could count on Cubans' unwavering support, in recent years many younger members of the community have begun to lean towards the Democrats.

“The older the generation, the more Republican and conservative they tend to be,” says Prof Gamarra. And the younger, the more liberal and Democratic.

Vital to either party’s chances of winning Florida, the biggest swing state in Tuesday’s election, is the Latino vote, which now accounts for 15 per cent of the state’s electorate.

And winning the Latino vote means performing strongly in Miami-Dade County, where 66.7 per cent of residents – the largest proportion of any county in the state – are Hispanics.

Hispanic vote

According to the Pew Research Center, Democratic Hispanic voter registration in Miami-Dade has risen 66 per cent from 2006 to 2014, and support from the community was what allowed Obama win the county and the state in 2012 (Obama won Florida’s Hispanic vote 60 per cent to 39 per cent for Mitt Romney).

There are still more registered Republican Hispanic voters in the Miami-Dade (265,000, compared to 218,000 Hispanic Democrats), but the Republican figure is not rising.

And, increasingly, unaffiliated Hispanics are breaking for the Democrats. That trend is partly due to the changing profile of the Cuban-Americans, half of whom live in Miami-Dade.

"I'm more liberal, I guess you could say," says Tommy Gomez, a 25-year-old son of Cuban migrants who has come to the Café Versailles to buy some pastries.

For him, LGBT rights and the cost of going to college are bigger issues than US policy towards Cuba.

“I came into this world at a time when there was an embargo on the country. It’s all I’ve ever known. Obviously I want to travel back there. I’m curious as to where my roots are. But it’s not a deal-breaker for me,” he says.

Gomez’s family are split on the election: his parents are Republicans, but he has already cast his vote for Clinton. It was an easy decision, he says, even though neither candidate caught his imagination.

“The general consensus is probably that neither side is a particularly good option. People feel they’ve been cornered into having to vote between two people that they’re not really fans of. So it’s either the woman or the crazy guy.”