Politico (Article by Scott Wong): In Miami’s Little Havana, the Cuban exile community has rallied to the defense of its favorite son, Sen. Marco Rubio, as he fights off allegations he embellished his family history to boost his meteoric political career.
But well beyond Calle Ocho, the freshman Florida Republican still faces a bigger challenge selling himself to the broader Hispanic electorate. Rubio is expected to encounter tough questions from voters and activists over his hard-line stance on immigration as he heads to Texas and possibly Arizona next week to court Hispanic voters and high-dollar donors. As his personal history morphs into a national political story, it’s clear Rubio still has plenty of skeptics in the Latino political community.
“He is a laughing stock in the Southwest … because people discovered he wasn’t telling the truth about his political Cuban exile history,” said DeeDee Garcia Blase, founder of Somos Republicans, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GOP group that backs a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “They are saying, at the end of the day, ‘He is just like us. His mom and dad came here; they migrated because of economic reasons, just like the rest of us.’”
The controversy about when — and under what circumstances — his family arrived in the U.S. has proved to be the first major test for the rising GOP star as he transitions from Sunshine State politics to the national stage, where the exile experience that he’s embraced doesn’t resonate among non-Cuban Hispanics as much as it does in the quaint cafes and bustling streets of Little Havana.
That cultural divide between his home crowd and the larger Latino electorate could pose a problem for Republicans who have billed Rubio, a favorite for the vice presidential spot in 2012, as their party’s great Hispanic hope.
On Nov. 4, Rubio will make his first appearance in Texas since taking office in January, addressing the conservative Texas Hispanic Leadership Forum in Dallas as part of an effort to draw more Hispanic voters to the GOP. The trip could include fundraisers in Texas and Arizona, though the schedule has not been settled.
“Sen. Rubio is able to articulate conservative principles and ideas in a very effective manner,” said Rubio spokesman Alex Conant. “The difference is he’s able to do it in perfect Spanish.”
With more than 50 million Hispanics living in the U.S., experts believe that if Republicans want to take back the White House next year, they’ll have to secure at least 35 percent of the Hispanic vote as former President George W. Bush did in 2004 and Sen. John McCain failed to do in 2008. But while Cuban Americans are a powerful political force and the largest Hispanic group in greater Miami, they represent only 3.5 percent of all Hispanics in the country.
Rubio’s decision to identify with the exile rather than the economic migrant community won’t play well politically with other Hispanics groups in Texas and elsewhere, said Nestor Rodriguez, a fourth-generation Mexican American and a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies immigration issues.
“They would just see him as another politician,” Rodriguez said. “His parents came as economic migrants, yet he ignores that, and he promotes the refugee cause rather than [helping] other economic migrants who may need amnesty. There is a side of experience and history that is being ignored that is very important.”
Born in Miami in 1971, Rubio has taken a definitively conservative tack on immigration, even as fellow Cuban and Hispanic Americans in Congress have endorsed a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11.2 million people illegally living in the U.S. He’s argued that greater border security and workplace enforcement are the solution to the nation’s illegal immigration problem, not the DREAM Act for immigrant children or other forms of amnesty.
“Sen. Rubio has always said the Republican Party needs to be the party of pro-legal immigration, not just anti-illegal immigration,” Conant said. “He’s pro-legal immigration.”
Rubio’s immigration policies have come under greater scrutiny following stories in The Washington Post and other outlets last week revealing that his parents first came to the U.S. before Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959. Rubio had often suggested in interviews and on his official Senate website that his parents fled the Castro regime. The Post said Rubio had “embellished” his family history to ingratiate himself with the politically powerful exile community in Florida, an accusation Rubio has forcefully denied.
The senator has conceded he may have gotten some dates wrong, but he has continued to insist he’s the “son of Cuban exiles” because his parents never could return to their native country after 1961, when they realized their country had taken a turn for the worse under Castro. However, new discrepancies in Rubio’s story surfaced this week based on his parents’ 1956 immigration application, which shows they never intended to return to Cuba.
“Permanently,” Rubio’s father answered when asked how long they intended to stay in the U.S.
Yet inside Little Havana cafes and on Cuban exile radio stations, people are standing by Rubio. So are members of the Cuban-American delegation on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who emigrated from Cuba with her mother in 1960, said Rubio’s Democratic critics are using his misstep to “chop him down” simply because he is a conservative Hispanic with a promising future.
“I have never heard of any Cuban-American individual or group or Cuban exile organization ever make a distinction between pre-Castro Cubans in the U.S. and post-Castro Cubans … or that those who came pre-Castro are economic immigrants and those post-Castro are refugees,” Ros-Lehtinen told POLITICO.
“It is not a controversy in Miami. Go to Versailles [restaurant] in deep inner Little Havana, and ask them what they think. What Marco Rubio describes is a Cuban exile story.”
Some Hispanic GOP state lawmakers in Texas who have been buzzing about Rubio’s upcoming speech have also downplayed the controversy, saying his critics are grasping at straws because they’re “afraid” of Rubio.
“I think Marco Rubio has touched a nerve, just like [members of] the tea party [have] touched a nerve because they’re speaking the truth,” said state Rep. Raul Torres, who represents the Corpus Christi area. “They’re saying, ‘We’ve lost our way and need to get back on a path to prosperity.’”
But Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a Puerto Rican American and one of Congress’s most vocal advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, said he doesn’t understand how Rubio can be “so anti-immigrant, so xenophobic, so tied to the extremist right wing.”
“You know what I say to him — the immigrants who come here today that you brush aside so easily, I hear your story about your mom and dad. They are the same. They came here to work hard, to sweat and toil in some of the least of the meaningful jobs,” Gutierrez told POLITICO.
“His story is that they washed dishes, that they worked in restaurants, that they sweated and they toiled at blue-collar jobs, and I say, ‘You know what, it sounds like the very same people that you want to deny an opportunity in the United States today, and I think it’s kind of shameful.’”
But well beyond Calle Ocho, the freshman Florida Republican still faces a bigger challenge selling himself to the broader Hispanic electorate. Rubio is expected to encounter tough questions from voters and activists over his hard-line stance on immigration as he heads to Texas and possibly Arizona next week to court Hispanic voters and high-dollar donors. As his personal history morphs into a national political story, it’s clear Rubio still has plenty of skeptics in the Latino political community.
“He is a laughing stock in the Southwest … because people discovered he wasn’t telling the truth about his political Cuban exile history,” said DeeDee Garcia Blase, founder of Somos Republicans, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GOP group that backs a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “They are saying, at the end of the day, ‘He is just like us. His mom and dad came here; they migrated because of economic reasons, just like the rest of us.’”
The controversy about when — and under what circumstances — his family arrived in the U.S. has proved to be the first major test for the rising GOP star as he transitions from Sunshine State politics to the national stage, where the exile experience that he’s embraced doesn’t resonate among non-Cuban Hispanics as much as it does in the quaint cafes and bustling streets of Little Havana.
That cultural divide between his home crowd and the larger Latino electorate could pose a problem for Republicans who have billed Rubio, a favorite for the vice presidential spot in 2012, as their party’s great Hispanic hope.
On Nov. 4, Rubio will make his first appearance in Texas since taking office in January, addressing the conservative Texas Hispanic Leadership Forum in Dallas as part of an effort to draw more Hispanic voters to the GOP. The trip could include fundraisers in Texas and Arizona, though the schedule has not been settled.
“Sen. Rubio is able to articulate conservative principles and ideas in a very effective manner,” said Rubio spokesman Alex Conant. “The difference is he’s able to do it in perfect Spanish.”
With more than 50 million Hispanics living in the U.S., experts believe that if Republicans want to take back the White House next year, they’ll have to secure at least 35 percent of the Hispanic vote as former President George W. Bush did in 2004 and Sen. John McCain failed to do in 2008. But while Cuban Americans are a powerful political force and the largest Hispanic group in greater Miami, they represent only 3.5 percent of all Hispanics in the country.
Rubio’s decision to identify with the exile rather than the economic migrant community won’t play well politically with other Hispanics groups in Texas and elsewhere, said Nestor Rodriguez, a fourth-generation Mexican American and a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies immigration issues.
“They would just see him as another politician,” Rodriguez said. “His parents came as economic migrants, yet he ignores that, and he promotes the refugee cause rather than [helping] other economic migrants who may need amnesty. There is a side of experience and history that is being ignored that is very important.”
Born in Miami in 1971, Rubio has taken a definitively conservative tack on immigration, even as fellow Cuban and Hispanic Americans in Congress have endorsed a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11.2 million people illegally living in the U.S. He’s argued that greater border security and workplace enforcement are the solution to the nation’s illegal immigration problem, not the DREAM Act for immigrant children or other forms of amnesty.
“Sen. Rubio has always said the Republican Party needs to be the party of pro-legal immigration, not just anti-illegal immigration,” Conant said. “He’s pro-legal immigration.”
Rubio’s immigration policies have come under greater scrutiny following stories in The Washington Post and other outlets last week revealing that his parents first came to the U.S. before Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959. Rubio had often suggested in interviews and on his official Senate website that his parents fled the Castro regime. The Post said Rubio had “embellished” his family history to ingratiate himself with the politically powerful exile community in Florida, an accusation Rubio has forcefully denied.
The senator has conceded he may have gotten some dates wrong, but he has continued to insist he’s the “son of Cuban exiles” because his parents never could return to their native country after 1961, when they realized their country had taken a turn for the worse under Castro. However, new discrepancies in Rubio’s story surfaced this week based on his parents’ 1956 immigration application, which shows they never intended to return to Cuba.
“Permanently,” Rubio’s father answered when asked how long they intended to stay in the U.S.
Yet inside Little Havana cafes and on Cuban exile radio stations, people are standing by Rubio. So are members of the Cuban-American delegation on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who emigrated from Cuba with her mother in 1960, said Rubio’s Democratic critics are using his misstep to “chop him down” simply because he is a conservative Hispanic with a promising future.
“I have never heard of any Cuban-American individual or group or Cuban exile organization ever make a distinction between pre-Castro Cubans in the U.S. and post-Castro Cubans … or that those who came pre-Castro are economic immigrants and those post-Castro are refugees,” Ros-Lehtinen told POLITICO.
“It is not a controversy in Miami. Go to Versailles [restaurant] in deep inner Little Havana, and ask them what they think. What Marco Rubio describes is a Cuban exile story.”
Some Hispanic GOP state lawmakers in Texas who have been buzzing about Rubio’s upcoming speech have also downplayed the controversy, saying his critics are grasping at straws because they’re “afraid” of Rubio.
“I think Marco Rubio has touched a nerve, just like [members of] the tea party [have] touched a nerve because they’re speaking the truth,” said state Rep. Raul Torres, who represents the Corpus Christi area. “They’re saying, ‘We’ve lost our way and need to get back on a path to prosperity.’”
But Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a Puerto Rican American and one of Congress’s most vocal advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, said he doesn’t understand how Rubio can be “so anti-immigrant, so xenophobic, so tied to the extremist right wing.”
“You know what I say to him — the immigrants who come here today that you brush aside so easily, I hear your story about your mom and dad. They are the same. They came here to work hard, to sweat and toil in some of the least of the meaningful jobs,” Gutierrez told POLITICO.
“His story is that they washed dishes, that they worked in restaurants, that they sweated and they toiled at blue-collar jobs, and I say, ‘You know what, it sounds like the very same people that you want to deny an opportunity in the United States today, and I think it’s kind of shameful.’”
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