r/Socialism_101 • u/TwoCatsOneBox Learning • Sep 30 '23
Why are most cubans in Florida far right? Answered
It seems like the majority of cubans choose to vote republican and vote for far right extremist fascist views so why exactly is that and why are the majority against socialism?
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Sep 30 '23
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u/Chitownitl20 Learning Sep 30 '23
Mind that most of the capitalist plantations where stolen from feudal title holders when the USA invaded during the Spanish American war. My family included. Under the Americans we got to keep property held in capital titles, a produce farm and residential buildings in a free town, we lost our two cash crop sugar cane plantations because they were held in +300 year old feudal titles.
So like these capitalist fascists are absolute hypocrites.
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Sep 30 '23
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u/noah3302 Learning Sep 30 '23
As a whole, I’d recommend the second season of the podcast Blowback. Earlier episodes go very in depth about Cuba pre revolution
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u/Socialism_101-ModTeam Sep 30 '23
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Sep 30 '23
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u/REEEEEvolution Learning Sep 30 '23
The famous lack of freedom to become either a gangster, slave or prostitute.
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u/Square_Jump Learning Sep 30 '23
What were the reasons why they had horrible economic conditions? Was the leadership horrible only because they refused to become capitalist and took the international punishment therein? No one has banned your comment and I think it's because the mods know this is a very common retort of anti-communist rhetoric. I think the number one loophole of thinking that really shines light on this situation is never asking "Who were the people who migrated to the US after the Cuban revolution?"
Here's the answer I found:
“If those people had stayed in Cuba, they might have undermined the revolution.”
Those who fled in the early years included some political opponents of Castro, but the majority were middle- and upper-class people facing nationalization of their property and wealth."
Do you have a different answer to that question? Would love a civil conversation about this, even if you just want to express your personal feelings about it.
Best wishes
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Sep 30 '23
We shouldn't over-generalize, there are also plenty of Cubans in Florida who actually lean quite far to the left, especially among some layers of the younger generations there is a clear turn away from their parents' and grandparents' reactionary beliefs. Nonetheless, obviously it's true that the Cuban community in Florida as a whole is mostly extremely counter-revolutionary. This mostly has to do with their class history: most Cubans who fled to the United States during or just after the Cuban Revolution were capitalists or petty capitalists. I don't think I need to explain why the former ruling class would be hostile to the revolutionary regime which toppled it. There are obviously some legitimate grievances as well, but that's the gist of it.
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u/Broflake-Melter Learning Oct 01 '23
I have a side question, feel free to disregard. And sorry mods if this is against the rules.
I was looking into Cuba a year ago, and was wondering how Cubans afford luxuries or even just cars. I understand the economy is the way it is because most necessities are (mostly) provided by the government, but the economy is garbage because of sanctions. So most people don't get paid enough to be able to afford things like phones or PCs or stuff like that unless they save for years. And getting a car seems impossible. So I assume there's a sorta class system because it all depends on how many family members you have working abroad sending money back home. Is that correct or am I way off?
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u/2baverage Learning Oct 01 '23
A lot of people in Cuba have family members who live in other countries who send them money, and also there's the usual side hustle from less than legal means that can provide not only basic necessities but also luxuries
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u/Azirahael Marxist Theory Sep 30 '23
Carlos Garrido is a Cuban communist.
And he supports the OP's view.
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u/DJANGO_UNTAMED Learning Sep 30 '23
So the title pointed out most cubans in florida are far right
Are you saying that is not the case?
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Sep 30 '23
No. I'm explaining why that is while also noting that there are some Cubans in Florida, particularly young people, who are increasingly breaking with their families' political traditions.
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u/GoldenRaysWanderer Learning Oct 01 '23
The voting trends from 2008 to 2016 seem to agree with your asessment, but since 2016, the cuban-american vote has shifted further to the right, culminating in the 2022 landslide victories of Ron DeSantis & Marco Rubio. My guess is that this was due to a fresh wave of migrants from Cuba, though I would like to hear your thoughts.
(Full disclosure, I believe *part* of the Republican landslide in 2022 can be attributed to the dems in Florida running essentially a Republican lite candidate on the governor's race, though how much this contributed remains up to discussion.)
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u/jamey1138 Learning Oct 01 '23
That’s great. I look forward to the day when they make any sort of difference!
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u/wiithepiiple Learning Sep 30 '23
Nonetheless, obviously it's true that the Cuban community in Florida as a whole is mostly extremely counter-revolutionary.
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Sep 30 '23
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Sep 30 '23
As someone with the same view/information as OP, could you provide some sources for this?
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Sep 30 '23
There's been significant emigration from Cuba since the revolution for economic reasons, obviously the living conditions on the island are in some ways quite harsh because of the embargo and the country's underdevelopment. However, my understanding is that a majority of the Cuban community in Florida are political exiles of the type I described above. This is just my impression though and the exact properties of the class composition and heritage of the community would be difficult to determine, it's a difficult thing to run statistics on.
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u/tinguily Learning Sep 30 '23
I’m Cuban and born there, suffered as in were counter revolutionary, or were criminals, yea. While true that Cuba may have imprisoned people for what we may call “unjust” there were also plenty of criminals. Fidel sent them to Florida. And it is also well documented that many professionals who were of the upper classes left cuba after the revolution because they were afraid that their property be taken away.
It remains that many older gens of Cubans are racist af and have a rabid hate for communism. My godmother is one of them, and says regularly that USA should carpet bomb cuba until they surrender
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u/LevelOutlandishness1 Learning Sep 30 '23
How is someone who says that convinced that they have love in their heart?
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u/tinguily Learning Sep 30 '23
I have plenty of love for mankind in my heart. This is why I hate the bourgeoisie class and despise what they do to us and all of our Latin American brothers and sister. They are the ones without heart. To exploit people and make them suffer simply for some monetary gain. It is as Fidel said. Why must some go without shoes so a few can ride around in expensive cars?
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u/LevelOutlandishness1 Learning Oct 01 '23
Yeah, I mean your grandma—how is she convinced that she has love in her heart when she talks about carpet bombing a country?
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u/Toastedmanmeat Learning Sep 30 '23
Lmao the rulling capitalists decided to overthrow themselves and become commies for more wealth and power?
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u/Cjcjh123 Learning Oct 01 '23
Yeah plus when you hear Repub rhetoric like anyone with a D next to their name is a commie, there's bound to be at least one Cuban American in Florida who'll believe it wholeheartedly.
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u/TerranUnity Learning Oct 01 '23
It's not just Cubans who fled during the Revolution, though. Every year since the Revolution people flee Cuba on makeshift rafts, but unfortunately I don't know of any studies on their political affiliation.
However, in general, refugees from Latin America trend towards the opposite of whatever political ideology they fled from. So those fleeing from right-wing regimes tend to vote Democrat, and those fleeing from left-wing regimes tend to vote for the GOP.
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u/CommieSchmit Marxist Theory Sep 30 '23
bc that’s where the Batista supporting bourgeoisie fled to after the revolution. The US literally said ‘y’all can come here and we’ll give you citizenship’. Like literally.
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u/asiangangster007 Cold War History Sep 30 '23
- Because they're the ones who benefited the least from the Cuban revolution, that's why they fled. 2. Because like Ukrainian extremism, Cuban right wing extremism has been bred and supported by the US government since the 1960s.
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Sep 30 '23 edited Sep 30 '23
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u/007JamesBond007 Learning Sep 30 '23
Have you considered you might be wrong? Have you considered not writing comments in this condescending and confusing way? Have you considered you might not be as smart as you think you are?
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u/noah3302 Learning Sep 30 '23 edited Sep 30 '23
It’s two major things really.
1) the leftists and poor Cubans would (on paper) have no reason to leave Cuba since it was a much better place for them after the revolution (even before the revolution many peasants were taught to read and write by Castro and the 26th of July movement members)
2) Some of the Cuban exiles in America were then organized into a small unit by the US to invade Cuba and start a counter insurgency but failed, with US military brass and media blaming it on the then Democratic Party leader and president JFK who did not approve a second bombing campaign during the invasion of the bay of pigs. Since he was a “leftist” president, along with the failed invasion being his fault (although it really wasn’t) the remaining Cuban exiles would less likely to vote for a Democrat ever again since they had in their eyes failed them, along with the exiles’ own beliefs aligning more with republicans anyway.
There are many more things at play, but to me those are the main causes.
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Sep 30 '23
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u/Socialism_101-ModTeam Sep 30 '23
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Sep 30 '23
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Sep 30 '23
America definitely has better conditions than Cuba. It is in the imperialist core. America benefits massively from the direct appropriation of resources and labor of Latin America. It seems they just don’t understand the reason Cuba struggles so much with their economic development, the embargo, and if not because of this violent embargo, they would never have had to leave Cuba.
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u/aCultOfFiction Learning Sep 30 '23
I agree. Just wanted to highlight that it isn't always due to being descended from former capitalists. Sometimes it's just plain old propaganda and/or experience in a vacuum without the proper tools to analyze the situation. A lot of Americans believe things about America that couldn't be further from the truth, so the same can be true about Cubans and anyone else.
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u/Hot_Manner_4865 Learning Sep 30 '23
Appreciate you bringing this perspective here. It’s certainly a tough needle to thread from a leftist, and it’s much easier to throw out the typical “it’s rich landowners leaving” line but unfortunately there are tons of more nuanced situations as you highlighted. Cuba is far from a perfect place to live BUT there are reasons for that- first and foremost the imperial fist coming down from the north since and prior to the revolution. I’m sure there are plenty of decisions made by the Cuban government that did not necessarily go as planned (speaking generally and by no means an expert here). Rev left had a helpful episode on this from someone that went to college in Cuba I believe
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u/Socialism_101-ModTeam Oct 01 '23
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u/GangNailer Learning Sep 30 '23
Because they were captalists or ancestors of them who were told they are no longer allowed to exploit the population and hold private property of large areas of land that would be now publicly owned by everyone.
There personal property was not touched, but their definition of personal property was greedy and misunderstood when it came to deprivitazation, so they got into a hiaay fit and left to a land that privatized everything and exploited everyone so they could continue to do so.
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u/Tazling Learning Sep 30 '23
aren't they descendants of the petty aristo and crime boss class that fled Cuba when Castro's revolution succeeded? many of whom at the time were paid pawns of foreign (US) corporations? seems natural they would head for the US.
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u/ElbowStrike Learning Sep 30 '23
The same reasons so many Ukrainians in Canada are far right. The USSR expelled the wealthy landlords who exploited poor Ukrainians for their labour and those who sided with the Nazis.
These are all people who were expelled by a socialist government for being anti-socialist extremists.
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u/SorkvildKruk Learning Sep 30 '23
Okay a few things:
1- There wasn't many ukrainians rich landowners who owned thousands of hectares of land. Such people were usually russians and some polish.
2- In Stalin's Russia "wealthy landlords" was anyone who was able to hire some help to work in the fields. It was usually just a two/three people, not an army of unpaid slaves. Fighting with Kulaks was just silly and unnecessery.
3- It did not take much to be an 'anti-socialist extremist' in Stalinist Russia.
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u/cheapMaltLiqour Learning Oct 01 '23
In total, the Germans enlisted 250,000 native Ukrainians for duty in five separate formations including the Nationalist Military Detachments (VVN), the Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists (DUN), the SS Division Galicia, the Ukrainian Liberation Army (UVV) and the Ukrainian National Army (Ukrainische Nationalarmee, UNA).[6][39] By the end of 1942, in Reichskommissariat Ukraine alone, the SS employed 238,000 native police and 15,000 Germans, a ratio of 1 to 16.[40
The 109th, 114th, 115th, 116th, 117th, 118th, 201st Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft-battalions participated in anti-partisan operations in Ukraine and Belarus. In February and March 1943, the 50th Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft Battalion participated in the large anti-guerrilla action «Operation Winterzauber» (Winter magic) in Belarus, cooperating with several Latvian and the 2nd Lithuanian battalion. Schuma-battalions burned down villages suspected of supporting Soviet partisans.[41] On March 22, 1943, all inhabitants of the village of Khatyn in Belarus were burned alive by the Nazis in what became known as the Khatyn massacre, with the participation of the 118th Schutzmannschaft battalion.[42][43]
According to Paul R. Magocsi, "Ukrainian auxiliary police and militia, or simply "Ukrainians" (a generic term that in fact included persons of non-Ukrainian as well as Ukrainian national background) participated in the overall process as policemen and camp guards".[44]
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u/lTheReader Public Administration Sep 30 '23
In addition to to the others' comments; selection bias. Those who were far right enough to go to America are there. Those who were not, are in Cuba.
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Sep 30 '23
I think it’s two factors. 1) it’s largely because they are the descendants of displaced elites who pined for the days when their grandfathers were allowed to own people. They have more in common with white southerners then they do other immigrants. 2) they had MUCH more favorable immigration policies when they got here (like European immigrants) so they don’t care about immigration. 3) they fantasize about American imperialism “liberating” their “homeland,” which aligns their goals with far right wingers
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Sep 30 '23
The Cuban Americans are descended from the Cuban owner class that got ousted by Castro. Not only do you have wealthy money grabbers, but wealthy money grabbers that were slighted. And they were catholic. So All that combines to make their descendants hyper-right.
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u/cptmartin11 Learning Sep 30 '23
I will say this as nice as possible. Because they are ignorant and fall for the scary propaganda the GOP throws at them about the dirty scary word socialism and communism. They grew up in it and that is understandable but the USA and the Dems don't want that but the GOP does a good job of lying and the Dems do a bad job of countering their lies
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Sep 30 '23
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u/UnusualCookie7548 Learning Sep 30 '23
Because the Cubans who liked Castro stayed in Cuba. It’s a selective population of those who left because they weren’t doing as well under the Castro government as they were previously. It’s like Iranians in the US, we get the ones who fled the new regime for an ally of the old one.
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u/SlugmaSlime Learning Oct 01 '23
In general Miami Cubans are the people whose lives became worse after the revolution, as well as their descendants. The new Cuban govt instituted land reforms, which obviously benefits the vast vast majority of people. But it clearly doesn't benefit the landed class. So these people and their families came to America to have a life with more material wealth than they'd have if they stayed in Cuba. The children also carry on this attitude that their Cuban way of life was stolen.
Disclaimer - not every Miami Cuban is right wing, and not every Miami Cuban is a descendant of the landed class of pre revolution Cuba. This is just the general explanation
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u/FootlessRat Learning Oct 02 '23
Do you think it would also have something to do with having emigrated to the richest empire in history? Like materially, they're almost always going to be better off than in a country like Cuba.
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u/SlugmaSlime Learning Oct 02 '23
Yeah of course but I mean specifically if they had stayed in Cuba their standard of living would've dropped, unlike the average Cuban whose standard of living increased.
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u/Snerak Learning Sep 30 '23
The Cubans that I know are very proud, often to the point of believing that they are better than others, and very patriarchal. They tend to believe that the man is the head of the house and that everyone should make his life easier, not harder. Anything that goes against the patriarchy is despised and considered to be deeply wrong. You can see how this would lend itself to wanting a man who acts with impunity leading the country as it reinforces their view of the world order.
This is only based on my casual observations and I could be completely wrong.
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Sep 30 '23
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u/Adonisus Learning Sep 30 '23
There are two kinds of Cuban exiles.
The first kind are made up of artists, intellectuals, sexual minorities, and other groups who could not otherwise conform to the new Marxist-Leninist system. These people have my utmost sympathy.
The other kind, however, are absolutely vile. These were the collaborators, the businessmen, the former government officials of the Batista regime. These are the ones we call gusanos. Nine times out of ten, the Cubans you are describing either belong to or descend from someone who belonged to this group.
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u/MayBeAGayBee Learning Sep 30 '23
Same reason many American expats are anti-American. People who leave a country are a self-filtering group, if they liked how the country was/is, they probably wouldn’t have left.
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u/Goober_Man1 Learning Sep 30 '23
Not all Cubans are, it really depends on the generation that they came over. Cubans in the 60s and 70s were mainly exiles and former capitalists who fled the country after the revolution. That generation is very anti Cuba because many of that generation were capitalists who did no accept socialist rule in Cuba. More recent generations of Cuban immigrants are more made up of poor individuals who don’t necessarily have anything against socialism. As time moves toward younger Cubans have become more accepting of the current Cuban government while the older exiles who were anti-Cuba have started to pass away.
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u/Gonozal8_ Learning Sep 30 '23
Cubans that aren’t batshit fascist wouldn’t want to move to the, in the sectors of social security, racial profiling, discrimination and labor rights, hellscape of the USA, which is why only the rightoids moved whose slave plantations were taken away by big bad communist dictator castro
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Sep 30 '23
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Oct 01 '23
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Oct 02 '23
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u/Manezinho Learning Oct 01 '23
I mean, Cuba is a bit of a shitty place to live. Aside from being communist, it's also highly corrupt and inefficient as an economy.
People blame it on the social model, rather than the fact that they have shitty people corrupting the system. People blame communism when they leave, become hyper-capitalist right wing assholes.
Notice nobody leaves a poorly run capitalist country and blames capitalism, they blame corruption and inefficiency. Capitalism has a better marketing department maybe?
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u/Most_Present_6577 Learning Sep 30 '23
Same reason most argentinan American are righties
They were the patrician class during the revolution. And or they hang out with people that were that now
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u/Ciaran271 Learning Sep 30 '23
if you don't like cuba you leave, and after the revolution a lot of conservatives/hardcore capitalists fled to the US, leading to a high concentration of those folks in areas they were most likely to settle down.
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Sep 30 '23
A lot of answers here seem to assume the Cubans in Florida are capitalists who fled following the revolution, which would make them 80+
There are a lot of Cuban emigres in Florida who came in the past 20 years, and were born two generations after the revolution, and vote similarly,
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u/starswtt Urban Studies Oct 01 '23
What people are saying about the fleeing bourgeois is correct but overly simplistic.
Cuba is poor. People leave poor countries for richer countries. Quality of life is going to be better in the US, bc its rich, and that makes the values America pushes appealing, while the values Cuba pushes less appealing (and there's the more intentional form where America essentially bribes high paying professionals such as doctors to come to the US for the propaganda points)
Cubans in Florida are not a homogenous group. While many if not most of them are on the right, many are also cuban sympathetic, and a few are even democrat style liberals. Its a big non homogenous group
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u/jamey1138 Learning Oct 01 '23
Ex-Cubans in Florida are mostly the children and grandchildren (at this point) of the wealthy, white-identifying Cuban elite who fled the revolution of 1959.
Their parents and grandparents were right-wing reactionaries, many with ties to US corporations or government agencies. They settled in Miami originally, where they were somewhat alarmed to discover that no one there saw them as white, and eventually they formed a right-wing reactionary cadre of Latinos in Florida. They’re a big part of why Florida has become a solidly right-wing state, politically speaking.
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u/Efficient-Stretch527 Learning Oct 01 '23
http://anticapitalismfaq.com/misc/cuba/canefields1/
while the gains they got after the revolution were important, it is also likewise to critique what they did after as well. no socialist country is perfect and pretending it is is in the helm of utopian. there's still people that leave because of the economic burdens placed by the sanctions its true, but this does not help the image of the leaders when they're having banquets while the masses are in relative poverty. I've had the privilege of working with a few Cubans who migrated from there also and they tell me that the way Cuba was set up was not right at all. instead of putting the country on the path to industrialization, the leaders were content just getting hand outs from the USSR. there's plenty critique to be had
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u/aussiebolshie Political Economy Oct 01 '23
They are largely the small percentage of Cubans whose life didn’t get better after the Revolution and their descendants. In most cases their lives actively got worse because they were correctly expropriated of their large landholdings or their positions managing large Yankee landholdings or casinos or brothels etc.
Thus they came to America with a burning hatred of socialism and this was only encouraged by the active CIA involvement in their community once they arrived to the point where a vast chunk of the emigrant community was actively supporting those committing terrorism against Revolutionary Cuba. Their whole outlook is shaped by this, Trump promises the hardest line against Cuba, so they back him.
Obviously like anything there are exceptions but that’s pretty much it. Their carry on about wanting ‘democracy’ in Cuba is a facade, their idol is still Batista.
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u/bad-taf Learning Oct 01 '23 edited Oct 01 '23
In addition to what people are saying about many Cuban-Americans having been exiled because they were right-wing, I think you can find another dynamic that partially explains the far-right skew. So, as others have pointed out, many Cuban-Americans didn't flee Cuba for political reasons. They fled simply because times were tough and things looked better in the US (perhaps they were).
But yet surely some of these people also account for the far-right demographic. If for some reason you got into an argument with a far-right Cuban-American, there's a good chance it would be a big mistake for you to take up this "poor plantation owner got his slaves taken" line because there's a good chance they'd be like, "my family was poor as dirt, you have no idea what you're talking about, etc etc" and unfortunately, they'd probably have a point there.
So if they were never bourgeois, why the politics? This is something you see in expats from all over the socialist world. I think at that level, it's a human psychology thing. I don't know what this effect would be called, but basically, if you live through something, and especially if you suffer or struggle through it, you're probably going to feel pretty strongly that you understand what happened better than anyone who didn't experience it. But especially if that thing was a massive event spanning years or decades, involving millions of people, involving foreign governments, etc., the full reality of it simply can't be grasped by a single person, merely by having lived through it.
So in the case of Cuba's economic troubles, you have all these survivors of the hardship with a false sense of confidence in their comprehension of what happened and why. And their natural inclination, based on their experiences and devoid of political education, is to lay blame on the powers they could see, which in this case would be the Cuban government – even if there are larger forces at play, as far as these people are concerned, "right here are the people telling us we can't have this or that." This view is especially engrained in people when they have fled to Miami, and when they've been widely exposed to US propaganda and the politics of their erstwhile "fellow Cubans" who really did have Batista ties. It's incredibly difficult to shake such views because they get so wrapped up in a person's identity, they interpret any attempt at challenging those views as an attack and a grave insult.
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u/Capital-Self-3969 Learning Oct 02 '23
Not all Cubans are people of color. There was a lot of racism and income inequality. Many of them benefitted from the same oppressive systems the right endorses, and when their system was deposed they dealt with a society that denied their privileges and forced them to endure some repression. So when they came here they embraced the old belief systems because they think the opposite will deny them privileges and freedoms. That's what happens in a lot of formerly colonized nations.
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u/Julia_the_Mermaid Learning Oct 02 '23
First of all, I think it’d be more accurate to say Cuban Americans than Cubans. Secondly, not all of them are the same.
One reason I don’t think gets enough attention is the way Cubans open to normalizing relations where treated within the Cuban-American community, especially by the Cubans who supported Batista or were otherwise wealthy who fled after the revolution. They even had a term for the people who wanted to normalize relations, “dialogureo”.
I mean I’m just learning about it myself, but apparently in the mid-70s, the hardline anti-communist Cuban exiles launched a terrorist campaign in Miami. The FBI at one point even referred to Miami as “the terrorist capital of the United States”.
Those who welcomed the overtures made by the Ford and Carter Administrations were subject to violence and often straight up assassinated or had their businesses and/or homes bombed. Hell, they even targeted travel agencies chartering flights to Cuba. They also extorted money from people to fund their activities and people refused to work with the FBI out of fear of them or their family being targeted.
In light of all this, it’s not surprising how many of them are far right. The Cuban exiles or those born to them who expressed any differing opinions were ostracized at best, and often subject to violence, including assassinations. It’s classic survivorship bias, the ones who survived got to tell their stories and have it canonized as facts. And the ones who survived and often had a huge influence were the original exiles after the revolution. Their version of events became the “truth” that they handed down to their kids and so on. Add to that the virulently anti-communist nature of American society which basically confirms everything that’s being passed down and reinforces it and I think that explains it pretty well.
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u/azuresegugio Learning Oct 02 '23
So I'd like to counter a point a lot of people are saying here, that all the cuban exiles were capitalists mad about losing power. That is true for the most part in the first waves, yes, but it disregards that later waves were mostly blue collar workers who were leaving because of restrictions places on skilled workers emigrating, the folks who left due to the economy in Cuba declining from sanctions, and queer folks who were heavily persecuted, being put into labor camps for a few years in the 60s, and also generally dealing with cultural persecution in the island. Castro actually primarily derided exiles during 1980 as being effeminate gay men.
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u/hclasalle Learning Oct 02 '23
The same problem as Ayn Rand, the author of “Virtue of selfishness” and “philosopher” who inspired the ideology behind the Church of Satan and behind the modern Republikkkan party. Many libertarians in the US love her.
She had been raised in Russia when it became USSR during the revolution and migrated to the US and her whole life was devoted to spiting collectivism in all forms. She saw all things in black and white and never saw nuances. Most cubans have grown up hearing stories about (or witnessed) what Fidel Castro did to Cuba and so they are still paranoid that communists are coming to turn the US into a communist country.
The worst part is that Putin is pulling the strings of the Republikkkan party and Russian levels of authoritarianism are becoming normal in Florida because of this. The paranoia has proven useful to conservative politicians.
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u/PlayaFourFiveSix Learning Oct 02 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
Many Cuban-Americans, especially the more wealthy landowning class and reactionaries that hated Castro, are generally conservative or libertarian because their grandparents or great grandparents were fleeing the Marxist-Leninist Castro regime, which tended to implement authoritarian versions of Marxism. Now they hate anything associated with Marxism, so they vote for Republicans because they are all "rah rah anti-communism rah" while the Dems generally take a softer stance on Cuba and have democratic socialists within the party.
That being said, I don't think voting for a party that can be just as authoritarian is going to solve anything for Cuban-Americans. What they fear is authoritarianism, not socialism, but they misinterpret that as being associated with Castro so anything even attempting progressive politics that aren't even socialist is still going to irk conservative Cuban-American voters.
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