Shpilkes In Little Havana For the GOP

Little Havana is part of Florida's 18th congressional district, currently represented by far right Cuban-American Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Ros-Lehtinen is a Bush rubber stamp at best and a bat-shit crazy extremist at worst. Next week's Time Magazine has a story that may well have Ros-Lehtinen and her allies, particularly corrupt Democrat Debbie Wasserman Shultz, zitstin' oyf shpilkes. Little Havana, and FL-18, used to be a reliably Republican district. Bush took 57% in 2000 and even after people experienced 4 years of his incompetent and venal rule, he still got 54% in 2004. After first being elected in 1989, Ros-Lehtinen has never gotten less than 60% of the vote and from 1994 until 2002 the Democrats didn't even run anyone against her! No one expects Ros-Lehtinen to have an easy ride to re-election this November, regardless of Wasserman Schultz' ongoing and ruthlessly determined campaign to undermine her Democratic opponent, Annette Taddeo. Little Havana, like FL-18, has changed dramatically, while Ros-Lehtinen has remained frozen in time, despite Wasserman Schultz' strategy of having her repeatedly scurrying across the aisle to vote with Democrats for the past 2 months-- hoping against hope that Miami-Dade voters will forget her nearly 2 decades of right-wing extremism.

Ironically, the Time article, like the NY Times story last month, used insidious Wasserman Schultz sources to push her "inevitability" meme-- that although the Diaz-Balart Brothers may lose their seats, Wasserman Schultz' best friend and partner in crime, Ros-Lehtinen, can't be beaten. This ignores what an atrocious representative Ros-Lehtinen has been, what an incredible alternative Annette Taddeo is, and the simple fact that FL-18 is the most Democratic of the three districts! Little Havana, which Time trumpets being so changed happens to not be in either Diaz-Balart district but in FL-18.

Time talks about a 5% lead that Mario Diaz-Balart holds over Joe Garcia but that was before the new voter registration numbers came out showing that GOP advantages have all but vanished. In the last 2 years the GOP voter registration advantage in Ros-Lehtienen's district has shunk from 22,000 voters to 8,000. By election time the advantage may well be with the Democrats. On top of that the 38-36% Republican registration advantage is negated by the fact that recent polls show the 23% of independents in the district breaking strongly (2 to 1) for Taddeo and against Ros-Lehtinen.

The unexpected tests spell trouble not just for the GOP but also for what has long been the staple of Miami politics: open hostility to the Castro regime in Havana. "These were once considered the safest Republican seats in Florida, if not the country," says political analyst Dario Moreno of Miami's Florida International University (FIU). "But waving the bloody shirt of anti-Castro politics is less effective now."

...Some of the shift stems from elderly voters like Coto, but younger Cuban Americans are restless too. Like their elders, they want to liberate Cuba, but they also want to get by in Miami, where the middle class is shriveling and home foreclosures are soaring. "I'm not running for President of Cuba," says Martinez. "Cuban Americans finally see themselves as part of the wider U.S.A., and they care about other issues."

Florida Democrats are drawing new strength from a growing number of non-Cuban Latinos. Miami's third Cuban-American Representative, 10-term GOP incumbent Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, usually faces token opposition, if any. Her 18th District is still 65% Latino, but it is less than 30% Cuban today. That has emboldened Democrats like her challenger, Colombian-American businesswoman Annette Taddeo, whose constituents worry less about Havana than about immigration, health care and U.S. indifference toward the rest of Latin America.

Still, a likely decisive issue in these races involves Cuba. In 2004, as a gift to conservatives, President Bush tightened restrictions on travel and remittances to the island. Cuban Americans--only those who have immediate family members in Cuba--can now visit just once every three years and send only $300 each quarter. The move backfired: most Miami Cubans oppose the new rules, according to an FIU poll, and they have been particularly unpopular among younger Cuban Americans. That was a big reason Miami computer programmer and lifelong Republican Joe Infante, 47, who has relatives in Cuba he can no longer visit, is now a registered Democrat. The regulations, he says, "have kept Cuban families separated but haven't put a dent in the Cuban regime." The move suggests that leaders of Florida's anti-Castro movement may have lost touch with the region's changing demographics. What would have worked in 1985 to deepen GOP support had the opposite effect in today's more diverse Miami. Says Garcia, sipping a café cubano in Little Havana: "Bush succeeded in dividing what was once a monolithic vote for his party."

Blue America has enthusiastically endorsed Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo. For the next 24 hours anyone who donates to both candidates through our Blue America ActBlue page will get a brand new Matt Keating double CD, Quixotic.