American Letter | Miami the Red

(Miami) At the Figaro barber, Johan Perez shows me 12 photos to help me choose my haircut. The men’s fashion is to shave the sides, in Miami as everywhere. Number 7 seems playable to me.

The 25-year-old barber is one of the millions of Latin American migrants who have crossed the border illegally. He explains to me with his 12 words of English and his two hands that imitate a furtive weasel how he crossed in El Paso three years ago. To avoid the agents and the smugglers, you have to do this calmly.

“Do you prefer Trump or Biden?”

— Trump, Trump!

In Little Havana, it is not surprising to find a vast majority of pro-Trump Cuban-Americans. Their families fled the Castro regime and have stuck to the Republican Party for 60 years.

But you, Johan, the Honduran who arrived illegally?

I ask him if he feels targeted when Trump talks about immigrants who “poison the blood of the nation.” But no. He registered, he’s waiting for his papers, and the rest, politics, it’s not his thing.

Hector Risco, known to regulars as Figaro, had managed to get to Mexico and from there went to Texas, via Laredo, 11 years ago. He opened this salon on Calle Ocho (8^e Rue), he works hard and only trusts Republicans.

Maria Elvida, 45, came to chat in the living room while her husband, Cuban like her, went shopping. “He arrived in 2016, he had built a boat himself, they put in an old Mercedes engine and they set sail. There were 22 of them.”

She takes a sip of Malt India, a soft drink from Puerto Rico, the island’s “cousin.”

She is less sharp than her parents’ generation, which saw in the Republican Party the most credible response to Castro’s communism. She voted for Obama, who eased the embargo. But this time, there is no hesitation.

“Trump, he may be crazy, he’s a little racist,” she concedes, “but he’s going to take care of business. Biden has lost his mind, he’s crazy, you can see that.”

With its cigar shops and Cuban music bars, Little Havana has become partly a tourist showcase. It has become gentrified, and the million Cuban-Americans who live in Greater Miami are scattered throughout.

But with its supermarkets, cafes and gathering places, it is still the social and cultural center of the Cuban community in the most Hispanic city in the United States. More than 70% of Miami’s population is “Latino,” and half of them have Cuban roots.

English in the neighborhood is clearly a second language, and you can live here without speaking a word of it. Or let’s say 12, like Johan.

Next to a Porsche and Ferrari dealership, the old public washhouse is still in full swing. It is not unusual to see a hen chased by a rooster in a bush or a few chickens on the run.

At L’Esquina del Pan con Bistec, I meet Luis Jurado, 70, sipping a blackberry milkshake that reminds him of Ecuador. At 65, he retired from his insurance company and bought a plane ticket to Miami. A late-in-life American dream. He works as a roofer for $12 an hour, sometimes $15. But for the past five years, everything has cost more, and there’s less money left to send home.

“I don’t know much about politics, but it was better with Trump for business… »

Since we changed president, everything costs more.

Mario Jacobs arrived with his parents in 1967. “They were small businessmen, Lebanese immigrants. They weren’t rich, but they lived well. After the revolution, everything was taken away from them: house, business. Everything. That’s why Cubans are conservative here.”

The next generation, born and raised here, is less fervent, especially those who left Miami. “My four children are progressives,” he says, half-smiling, as if resigned. “I have one, I call him the communist!”

On Calle Ocho, there is a monument to the insurgents of the failed Bay of Pigs coup and another commemorating the anti-Castro resistance fighters who remained in Cuba. “Communist” is not a light word.

Amore Rodriguez’s grandmother taught Russian at the University of Havana—a politically important language in Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s. She made a joke about the Cuban regime in class. A student told her, “Let me go through or I’ll report you.” She told him to go away. She was arrested the next day and imprisoned for months. She had become a gusanaa larva, a less than nothing. She went into exile in Miami.

“I was raised with American patriotism, there were flags everywhere, we learned American songs, we always talked about freedom, my family discovered God here, we were evangelical, and of course, you had to be Republican, it wasn’t even a question,” says Amore, 30.

When she got to university, she took one of those questionnaires that tell you what your political leanings are.

“It said Bernie Sanders to me! A socialist! I was shocked. I went to study straight and Republican with the idea of ​​bringing God back into schools. I came back Democrat, secular and cheerful… »

In his conservative family, the hardest part was coming out of the political closet.

One day, while she was listening to Tele Mundo with her grandmother, the “Latinos for Biden” ad came on. She hadn’t told her family that she was in it…

Which is difficult when your name is Amore Rodriguez and you founded the Cubans with Biden and we have his face on national TV…

“I understand where my grandmother is coming from. She lived through a tragedy. It’s very emotional. I’m trying to say that we don’t support the Castro regime, that we are against the dictatorship.”

The 2020 campaign was somewhat successful. “A lot of people were like, ‘I thought I was the only Cuban in Miami who was a Democrat.’ We made it acceptable that you’re not betraying your family by not being a Republican, I think. We shook things up.”

Trump won Florida in 2020 by 2.3 percentage points. But this year, if the polls are correct, his victory could be much more resounding.

“The Democrats ruined it,” Amore said. “I got burned. It’s easier for Republicans to say, ‘Democrats are socialists.’”

The 2022 midterm election was a triumph for Republicans. Governor Ron DeSantis won 59% of the vote in Florida, and a clear majority of the Latino vote—which is not a bloc. In Miami-Dade County, Hillary Clinton won by 27 percentage points in 2016; Biden won by 7 points in 2020; the tide turned so sharply that Republicans got their best results ever. It was as if other Hispanic communities had followed the Cuban trend.

Now Miami is red. Republican red.

“It’s not with the current candidate that we’re going to motivate voters,” says Amore, who admits to being “disappointed and very disillusioned.” “I can’t believe that our country chose to present these two candidates, in what Americans like to call the greatest power in the world. We should have thanked Joe Biden and had someone younger, capable of just holding the mirror up to Trump… That says a lot about a person, the ability to step aside in time, like George Washington did.”