Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

News21 reporter Elizabeth Mendez Berry and I have been talking to Cubans in Miami over the past week, as we report our story on challenges to their political power from other Latinos, and from within their own community. And we have noticed many events and people recurring as points of reference for this community.

For the largely Republican voting bloc that the Cubans of South Florida represent, moments like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (under Kennedy), the tightening of regulations on asylum granted to Cubans and the deportation of Cuban boy Elián González (both under Clinton) are all key points in a continual narrative of distrust of the Democratic party.

As we began reporting, Elián showed up once again in public consciousness — this time not as a six-year old boy being snatched from the hands of his great-uncle by a S.W.A.T. team, but as a 14-year-old, in Havana, joining Cuba’s Young Communist Union

And last week, Elián showed up agin, this time as a wrench in the works for Barack Obama, who was delivering a speech to a meeting of the country’s mayors gathered in Miami.

Outside the conference gathered local protesters, including Elian’s great-uncle Delfin Gonzalez who had fought the Clinton administration (and lost) to keep the child in the United States.

The group’s contention was with Obama counting two of the key players in Elian’s deportment on his team of advisers: his foreign policy adviser Greg Craig represented Elián’s father in the custody dispute back in 1999. Eric Holder, a member of Obama’s vice-presidential selection team, was deputy U.S. attorney general when government agents seized Elian from his relatives’ home in Miami’s Little Havana.

But Elian and the protest represent a larger discontent with Obama. The senator has stated that he will allow Cubans to return to Cuba more frequently than they are now (once every three years). Many of the people who saw the Elian deportation as a gross betrayal of their community may also see Obama’s proposed policy change as an erosion of the embargo the United States has imposed on Cuba since the ’60s.

Seeing Elian join the Communist Party was a further slap in the face for many of these protesters.

Miami Mayor Manny Diaz gained much of his support in running for mayor due to his work on the legal team that sought to keep Elián in Miami.

“I dedicated six months of my life to that cause,” Diaz told the Miami Herald on Friday. “I cringe every time I see the Cuban government use that boy for political purposes.”

The mayor withheld his support for Obama in his bid for election. Diaz endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary and told the Herald he would make a decision on his own timetable. He refused to indicate if his decision had anything to do with the Elian protests.