There have been a couple of new stories this week about one of my favorite issues — the reaction to the Bush administration’s new policy toward Cuba among Cuban-Americans in South Florida.
This was supposed to be an easy one for the Bush White House. In what appeared, at the time, to be a predictable election-year pander to a key group in the nation’s most important swing state, Bush announced harsh new restrictions on American travel and remittances to Cuba. The idea was to show that the administration was “getting tough” with Castro, a move that should shore up support for Bush among Cuban-Americans in Florida, a huge constituency in a state that he barely “won” four years ago.
It hasn’t been working out the way Bush had hoped. Instead of a new round of cheers from a group that has sided with the GOP for generations, a backlash against the new policy has begun. Considering Bush’s already precarious support in Florida (27 electoral votes), it’s a debacle that the White House can hardly afford.
The problem is with Bush’s choice of targets. The administration’s news policies don’t focus on Castro’s regime directly; they affect aid to the Cubans themselves. It’s received a mixed reaction, to put it mildly.
“It’s inhuman,” said Miriam Verdura, who was at the airport Wednesday morning seeing off friends who managed to book round-trip flights before the rules take effect and who were checking baggage with dozens of other travelers.
Because she last visited in 2002, Ms. Verdura will be ineligible to return until next year.
“Bush’s priority should first of all be to not keep Cuban families apart, because we suffer a lot,” she said.
As I’ve mentioned before, most post-Mariel exiles send money back to relatives in Cuba. Under Bush’s new policies, those remittances, as well as travel to the island, will be severaly limited.
In South Florida, the debate has divided the Cuban-American community. There will be political consequences for Bush.
A debate is raging about whether Mr. Bush went too far and whether the crackdown could in fact hurt his re-election prospects.
“It’s very important for people to vote against him because of this policy,” Ms. Aral said. “When we were helping check people into a flight last weekend, I said: ‘Are you registered to vote? Then you need to vote this November.’ Eighty percent said they would.”
The influential Cuban American National Foundation has led the way in criticizing Bush’s approach.
“You can’t send underwear or soap. Who wrote this? It almost seems like something someone would write to make the policy look absurd,” said Joe Garcia, executive director of influential exile group the Cuban American National Foundation.
The group welcomed other measures announced last month, such as increased support for dissidents, but the travel curbs were pushed by a hard-line sector of the exile community and were ill-advised, Garcia said in an interview this week.
“I don’t think anything that’s against families can help the development of democracy,” he said.
Garcia told the NYT:
“Someone who has been as pro family as President Bush should not be affecting family relationships between exiles and Cubans on the islands.”
Considering Florida’s narrow divide, it won’t take much to change the state from Red to Blue.
“How can you tell a person that because they left a child or parent behind that they can’t go and visit them?” said Maria Aral, chief executive of ABC Charters, which operates flights to Cuba. “How inhumane can you be?”
Aral, a Cuban-American, said she was a Republican but would not vote for Bush in November and hoped many other exiles also would not.
A few hundred Maria Arals and Bush will lose the election.