The Threat of Socialism Is Dividing Miami Cubans Ahead of the Election

[Woody]

This is why Trump will win Florida.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Is this why Romney won in 2012?

[WD]

Thought this was a serious post until I saw who OP was.

[DrScholl]

What threat of socialism? Trump is the one who is best friends with a communist dictator.

[wbrocks67]

If anyone honestly thinks a President Biden is pushing socialism then they are really just stupid, plain and simple.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Every day it becomes more and more obvious that

A) The Republicans desperately, desperately, desperately wanted to run against Bernie Sanders.

B) The left-wing folks who have taken standard Democratic Party policies and labeled them as "socialism" have done harm to the party.  The extent of that harm remains to be seen.

It's infuriating that after Biden spent the entire primary enduring withering attacks from Sanders/Warren over his refusal to adopt the policies they had labeled as "socialism", now many people believe that he's one of them and a socialist.  The entire point of the Biden candidacy was that he was a way for the party to reject the "socialism" of Bernie Sanders.

Stop calling universal health care "socialism."  You are playing right into Republicans' hands.

[Rand]

Explains why Trump is ahead in Florida.

[Suburbia]

Cubans in Florida they say are anti-Afro-Cuban, because Fidel wanted to liberate Black people.

Older Cubans are conservative, younger Cubans are swingy.

[Ancestral Republican]

I think the Castro boogeyman is starting to matter less and less as the years go by. Younger Cubans are smarter than that.

[longtimelurker]

This is why Trump will win Florida.

Didn't the Cubans use to vote almost monolithically Republican?  In other words, if the Cubans are "divided", then that means that the Democrats are picking up votes in the Cuban community.

Sort of like 1980 when the usually heavily Democratic Jewish vote was "divided" between Carter, Reagan, and Anderson.  That was good news for Reagan, not bad.

[Ancestral Republican]

Cubans in Florida they say are anti-Afro-Cuban, because Fidel wanted to liberate Black people.

Older Cubans are conservative, younger Cubans are swingy.

Imagine if the outcome of the US Civil War had been a Confederate victory and a permanent country in the southern States. Over time, they banned slavery but still maintained a hierarchical system resembling feudalism (not very different from the Jim Crow south.) Then there was a revolution in the 20th Century with massive support from the black population and poor whites. Many of the upper class and middle class whites who benefited from the unjust system flee to the Northern states (who had tacitly supported the Confederate dictators because they were a useful ally in the Caribbean against Communism.) Sure, Castro had his problems but in the eyes of the Afro-Cubans they had finally achieved a transformation in society and so very relatively very few of them ended up expatriating. That's not an exact analogy, but it describes a sizable percentage of the Cuban ex-pats in the US.

But a lot of those Cuban exiles are very old at this point, their children and especially grandchildren don't universally buy into the narrative.

[Former President tack50]

Completely unrelated, but that Spanish Vice news reporter has an incredibly noticeable Spanish accent (as in, from mainland Spain).

For some reason I found that very surprising

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Cubans in Florida they say are anti-Afro-Cuban, because Fidel wanted to liberate Black people.

Older Cubans are conservative, younger Cubans are swingy.

Imagine if the outcome of the US Civil War had been a Confederate victory and a permanent country in the southern States. Over time, they banned slavery but still maintained a hierarchical system resembling feudalism (not very different from the Jim Crow south.) Then there was a revolution in the 20th Century with massive support from the black population and poor whites. Many of the upper class and middle class whites who benefited from the unjust system flee to the Northern states (who had tacitly supported the Confederate dictators because they were a useful ally in the Caribbean against Communism.) Sure, Castro had his problems but in the eyes of the Afro-Cubans they had finally achieved a transformation in society and so very relatively very few of them ended up expatriating. That's not an exact analogy, but it describes a sizable percentage of the Cuban ex-pats in the US.

But a lot of those Cuban exiles are very old at this point, their children and especially grandchildren don't universally buy into the narrative.

If the white sugar plantation owners had just paid their laborers a few more pennies an hour and treated them with some modicum of decency, they might not have had to resort to backing a communist revolution.

The current state of Cuba is largely the fault of Cuban expats in America (or their ancestors who initially fled the country). They refused reform, so that left revolution as the only option.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Cubans in Florida they say are anti-Afro-Cuban, because Fidel wanted to liberate Black people.

Older Cubans are conservative, younger Cubans are swingy.

Imagine if the outcome of the US Civil War had been a Confederate victory and a permanent country in the southern States. Over time, they banned slavery but still maintained a hierarchical system resembling feudalism (not very different from the Jim Crow south.) Then there was a revolution in the 20th Century with massive support from the black population and poor whites. Many of the upper class and middle class whites who benefited from the unjust system flee to the Northern states (who had tacitly supported the Confederate dictators because they were a useful ally in the Caribbean against Communism.) Sure, Castro had his problems but in the eyes of the Afro-Cubans they had finally achieved a transformation in society and so very relatively very few of them ended up expatriating. That's not an exact analogy, but it describes a sizable percentage of the Cuban ex-pats in the US.

But a lot of those Cuban exiles are very old at this point, their children and especially grandchildren don't universally buy into the narrative.

This is literally Castro propaganda.

Yes, the earliest wave of exiles was the upper and middle-class, intellectuals, property owners, landlords, and other similar groups that were being targeted by communism.  That's not analogous to plantation owners, that's analogous to your average American white-collar professional who's probably saved up a few hundred thousand dollars and bought a house.  There were also tens of thousands of people who worked for the Batista government.  Were they all guilty of Batista's crimes?  Of course not.  But Castro targeted them for murder anyway.

But virtually all the subsequent waves were poor blue-collar workers.  Many of them were also former criminals, sick or mentally ill, LGBT, people whom Castro saw as burdens on society, so he shipped them up to the United States.  This was especially true of the Mariel Boatlift.

[KaiserDave]

I detest Castro but.....it’s uhhhhh Joe Biden.

[Ancestral Republican]

Cubans in Florida they say are anti-Afro-Cuban, because Fidel wanted to liberate Black people.

Older Cubans are conservative, younger Cubans are swingy.

Imagine if the outcome of the US Civil War had been a Confederate victory and a permanent country in the southern States. Over time, they banned slavery but still maintained a hierarchical system resembling feudalism (not very different from the Jim Crow south.) Then there was a revolution in the 20th Century with massive support from the black population and poor whites. Many of the upper class and middle class whites who benefited from the unjust system flee to the Northern states (who had tacitly supported the Confederate dictators because they were a useful ally in the Caribbean against Communism.) Sure, Castro had his problems but in the eyes of the Afro-Cubans they had finally achieved a transformation in society and so very relatively very few of them ended up expatriating. That's not an exact analogy, but it describes a sizable percentage of the Cuban ex-pats in the US.

But a lot of those Cuban exiles are very old at this point, their children and especially grandchildren don't universally buy into the narrative.

If the white sugar plantation owners had just paid their laborers a few more pennies an hour and treated them with some modicum of decency, they might not have had to resort to backing a communist revolution.

The current state of Cuba is largely the fault of Cuban expats in America (or their ancestors who initially fled the country). They refused reform, so that left revolution as the only option.

Agreed 1000%.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Completely unrelated, but that Spanish Vice news reporter has an incredibly noticeable Spanish accent (as in, from mainland Spain).

For some reason I found that very surprising

I noticed that too. I looked her up and apparently she grew up in Spain (born in Miami to Jorge Ramos and a Cuban woman, Gina Montaner).

[jaymichaud]

I mean this election is more a referendum on Trump than your average ‘liberal vs conservative’ election.

[Dac10]

Every day it becomes more and more obvious that

A) The Republicans desperately, desperately, desperately wanted to run against Bernie Sanders.

B) The left-wing folks who have taken standard Democratic Party policies and labeled them as "socialism" have done harm to the party.  The extent of that harm remains to be seen.

It's infuriating that after Biden spent the entire primary enduring withering attacks from Sanders/Warren over his refusal to adopt the policies they had labeled as "socialism", now many people believe that he's one of them and a socialist.  The entire point of the Biden candidacy was that he was a way for the party to reject the "socialism" of Bernie Sanders.

Stop calling universal health care "socialism."  You are playing right into Republicans' hands.

Past certain point, you have to shift the blame from the people trying to co-opt terms to the voter themselves. If there’s any voter out there who’s legitimately afraid the JOE BIDEN is a socialist, the blame falls on them lol. Democrats have to accept there is a certain subset of voters who will just never vote for them. Even though some of those voters might call themselves “moderate” - usually for social reasons, materially they’ll vote like a diehard conservative. If the current Joe Biden campaign is too close to “socialism” for someone, that person is (either knowingly or not) not acting in good faith.

Their mind is actively looking for reasons to associate the more “left” parties with the most extreme left. Drop them in any country with any politician candidates running any campaign and they’ll do the same thing. It’s ultimately a mental issue. It’s so people can self-justify always voting for the “right” party, while still calling themselves a moderate lol. It doesn’t matter who you run or what you campaign on.  The Dems could literally run McCain or Romney and they still wouldn’t vote for them for the same reason.

(I should point out this is a small minority of the exile community. But you’ll always find someone somewhere in a population promoting some idea. I’m sure I could find 1000 people on Earth in favour of exterminating all trees lol.)

[AltWorlder]

Yes, the earliest wave of exiles was the upper and middle-class, intellectuals, property owners, landlords, and other similar groups that were being targeted by communism.  That's not analogous to plantation owners, that's analogous to your average American white-collar professional who's probably saved up a few hundred thousand dollars and bought a house.  There were also tens of thousands of people who worked for the Batista government.  Were they all guilty of Batista's crimes?  Of course not.  But Castro targeted them for murder anyway.

The revolution likely overreached, as they tend to do, but it seems dubious that Castro targeted the entire middle class. He wasn't Pol Pot, not every communist revolution or country is as extreme.

[libertpaulian]

Wow.  An inflammatory thread that ISN'T a bronz thread.  New record.

[Adam Griffin]

[Hammy]

Every day it becomes more and more obvious that

A) The Republicans desperately, desperately, desperately wanted to run against Bernie Sanders.

B) The left-wing folks who have taken standard Democratic Party policies and labeled them as "socialism" have done harm to the party.  The extent of that harm remains to be seen.

It's infuriating that after Biden spent the entire primary enduring withering attacks from Sanders/Warren over his refusal to adopt the policies they had labeled as "socialism", now many people believe that he's one of them and a socialist.  The entire point of the Biden candidacy was that he was a way for the party to reject the "socialism" of Bernie Sanders.

Stop calling universal health care "socialism."  You are playing right into Republicans' hands.

Here we go again, Democrats should let Republican behavior dictate what they say and do. This is why we have Trump and why this country is in the sh**tter because Republicans have been calling Dems communists and socialists for decades. And guess what the end result is? It's not driving people away from the Dems because MUH SOCIALISM (the perception of being too centrist, on the other hand) but increasing favorable views on socialism.

Stop the pearl clutching over this because this whining is exactly what's allowed the GOP to control the narrative.

[Adam Griffin]

Every day it becomes more and more obvious that

A) The Republicans desperately, desperately, desperately wanted to run against Bernie Sanders.

B) The left-wing folks who have taken standard Democratic Party policies and labeled them as "socialism" have done harm to the party.  The extent of that harm remains to be seen.

It's infuriating that after Biden spent the entire primary enduring withering attacks from Sanders/Warren over his refusal to adopt the policies they had labeled as "socialism", now many people believe that he's one of them and a socialist.  The entire point of the Biden candidacy was that he was a way for the party to reject the "socialism" of Bernie Sanders.

Stop calling universal health care "socialism."  You are playing right into Republicans' hands.

Here we go again, Democrats should let Republican behavior dictate what they say and do. This is why we have Trump and why this country is in the sh**tter because Republicans have been calling Dems communists and socialists for decades. And guess what the end result is? It's not driving people away from the Dems because MUH SOCIALISM (the perception of being too centrist, on the other hand) but increasing favorable views on socialism.

Stop the pearl clutching over this because this whining is exactly what's allowed the GOP to control the narrative.

Yeah, I mean...if he honestly thinks the reason we don't have UHC is because of Republicans...lol

[Lognog]

I hate the idea of latino + Florida = Cuba. the latino community is very diverse in Florida. The race may be neck and neck with cubans but if there is heavy turnout among Puerto Ricans in central Florida then trump is finished in the state