New York Times
By Lizette Alvarez and Manny Fernandez
December 16, 2015
One
candidate, Marco Rubio, nurtured by the sprawling Cuban-American
community here, bounces effortlessly between two cultures — fritas and
hamburgers, Spanish and English
— in a city so comfortably bilingual that news conferences pivot
between the two languages.
The
other, Ted Cruz, is partial to cowboy boots, oversize belt buckles,
hard-right politics and the fire-and-brimstone style of the Baptist
Church. Mr. Cruz, a rare Cuban-American
outlier in a state where Hispanic usually means Mexican-American,
attended overwhelmingly white Christian schools in Houston and prefers
Spanglish to Spanish.
Together,
Senators Rubio and Cruz, of Florida and Texas, represent a watershed
moment in American politics: Two Hispanics running as top-tier
candidates for president,
and increasingly gunning for each other, in what one Latino
conservative has dubbed “the yuca primary,” referring to the popular
Cuban staple and an acronym for young urban Cuban-American. Their
collisions on defense, immigration and other issues formed one
of the main story lines at Tuesday’s Republican debate. The two have
emerged as perhaps the leading alternatives to Donald J. Trump.
But
this year’s campaign tale has not been the kind of Hispanic
coming-of-age story many Latinos had expected, particularly given their
growing numbers and influence in
the polls.
Three
years after Republicans vowed to do a better job courting Latinos in
the wake of their 2012 presidential defeat, the party has done the
opposite as immigrants come
under repeated assault by Mr. Trump.
The
harsh tone and the increasingly restrictive policies on immigration
that have been floated have complicated the prospects of Mr. Cruz and
Mr. Rubio who, as Latinos,
had a head start with Hispanic voters.
“If
you don’t have a positive, constructive tone, you will have a hard time
getting support from Latinos,” said Alfonso Aguilar, the executive
director of the Latino Partnership
for Conservative Principles, who also said that the two men, and Mr.
Cruz in particular, must do more to address Latino sensitivities.
“Hispanics won’t vote for someone just because they’re Hispanic.”
This
week, two liberal Hispanic groups rolled out radio and online
advertisements tethering Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio to Mr. Trump and
criticizing them as anti-Latino, a
tactic Democrats hope will dampen Latino support for them in the
general election. To win the White House, candidates probably need to
capture about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, political analysts say;
in 2012, Mitt Romney stumbled with 27 percent.
Hispanics
in the United States are far from monolithic, although most vote for
Democrats. As conservative Republican Cuban-Americans running for the
presidency, Mr. Cruz
and Mr. Rubio, both 44, represent the diversity of Latinos in the
United States and the degree to which their voters are not pledged to
one party. The two, who make a point of playing down their ethnic
identity, offer a departure from the more familiar Hispanic
narrative of, say, a Mexican-American Democrat from Texas.
Some
view the fact that they appeal to conservative voters in places like
Iowa and New Hampshire, where few Latinos live, as progress.
“We’re
in a new phase now — in some sense, ideology appears to be trumping
ethnicity,” said Henry Cisneros, a Democrat and the former mayor of San
Antonio, who served
as secretary of housing and urban development in the Clinton
administration.
The
similarities between the two candidates are striking. Both men are
first-generation Americans of Cuban descent, born five months apart.
Both come from staunchly anti-Castro
families that fled Cuba before the revolution. And both embrace
conservative positions on issues including abortion, guns, the minimum
wage and health care.
But
the differences between the two candidates, shaped by geography,
upbringing and community, are at least as compelling. In their style,
policies on immigration and
approach to their Hispanic identities — traits that can make or break
their success in courting both Latino and non-Latino voters — the two
sharply diverge.
Many
of Senator Rubio’s formative years were spent in bicultural Miami in
the 1970s and 1980s; linking arms with his Cuban-American identity came
naturally to him. Miami
is home to the largest Cuban-American population outside Cuba and its
presence transformed the city into the unofficial capital of Latin
America. A majority of Cubans here are Republican and fiercely
anti-Castro — positions that are evident in the anti-engagement
Cuba policies of both Mr. Rubio and Mr. Cruz. Tyranny, to them, is
personal.
Mr.
Rubio’s father and mother married in Cuba when they were young and
arrived in Miami in 1956, hoping for better — better jobs, better
prospects and better dreams for
their children, a common immigrant sentiment. Fidel Castro’s revolution
in 1959 dampened plans to return home, Mr. Rubio said in his 2012 book,
“An American Son.” So they stayed. His father had a career tending bar,
and his mother worked as a maid.
For
Mr. Rubio, assimilation meant embracing his American and Cuban sides
with equal gusto. Celebrating Noche Buena with lechon asado — Christmas
Eve with marinated pork
— and then watching the Miami Dolphins on New Year’s Day. Speaking
Spanish on Univision, English on Fox. Riffing on rap and dancing to
Cuban music.
Papá,
his grandfather, who tended to Mr. Rubio’s Cuban side during the
family’s six years in Las Vegas, made an endless stream of cafecitos, or
Cuban coffee, told him
about Cuban history and had Mr. Rubio read a Spanish-language newspaper
aloud so “I would learn to speak his native language correctly,” Mr.
Rubio wrote.
Nelson
Diaz, a former aide to Mr. Rubio and now the chairman of the Republican
Party in Miami-Dade County, said of Mr. Rubio: “He is American 100
percent, but he is very
in touch with his Cuban background.”
In
West Miami, where Mr. Rubio began his political career and lives
surrounded by Hispanic immigrants, he showed his cultural dexterity at a
recent rally by joking that
he would bring a Cuban pork roasting box to Washington. “Vamos a llevar una Caja China a la Casa Blanca,” Mr. Rubio said.
His wife, Jeanette, who is Colombian-American, stood nearby.
It
is this version of Mr. Rubio that has drawn Latinos to his corner, even
as his tap dance on immigration continues to dampen enthusiasm. “He
clearly understands and
has lived the story of the immigrant,” said Javier Palmarez, the
president of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “Marco gets
it.”
With
so many here touched by the vagaries of immigration policy, most in
Miami want to improve the law. Recognizing this, Mr. Rubio joined
Democrats in writing an immigration
reform bill in 2013 that created a path to citizenship and fortified
border security. For this, Mr. Rubio earned widespread praise.
After
fierce backlash from conservatives and Tea Party supporters, though,
Mr. Rubio quickly distanced himself from the bill and moved to emphasize
border security and
enforcement as a priority. This angered Hispanics who viewed it as an
attempt to placate the conservative base. They also have criticized Mr.
Rubio for failing to defend Latinos more robustly from Mr. Trump’s
attacks.
Mr.
Cruz, who unlike Mr. Rubio won his Senate seat with relatively tepid
Latino support, faces an even more arduous task wooing Latino voters.
His positions on immigration
and his reluctance to embrace his Latino roots have hurt him among
Hispanics from both parties, political experts said. Mr. Cruz supports
squeezing out undocumented immigrants by tightening enforcement,
temporarily freezing immigration levels and changing
the 14th Amendment to end birthright citizenship for the children of
undocumented immigrants.
Even Latino Republicans have been unsparing in their criticism of Mr. Cruz.
“I
don’t think that Latinos in Texas think that he identifies strongly
enough as a Latino himself, even though he is,” said Lionel Sosa, a
Texas media consultant and an
influential Hispanic Republican who said he would not vote for Mr.
Cruz. “I’m not sure that Hispanic Republicans really believe that Ted
Cruz represents them and their values and their issues.”
Mr.
Cruz grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Houston, where he attended
schools and lived in a county with scarcely any Cuban-Americans. A
self-described “geeky kid,” Mr.
Cruz changed his Spanish-sounding name, Rafael Edward Cruz, as a
teenager.
In
his autobiography, “A Time for Truth,” published in 2015, Mr. Cruz
described how, growing up, Rafael turned into Rafaelito and then Felito.
“The problem with that name
was that it seemed to rhyme with every major corn chip on the market,”
Mr. Cruz wrote. “Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos and Tostitos — a fact that
other young children were quite happy to point out.”
His
preference for Ted, a suggestion from Mr. Cruz’s Irish-American mother,
infuriated his father, Rafael, who in 1957 fled Cuba for Texas after
being arrested and beaten
by agents for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator. “He viewed it as a
rejection of him and his heritage, which was not my intention,” Mr.
Cruz wrote. For two years, his father refused to call him Ted. Today,
Mr. Cruz serves as his son’s Spanish-speaking
surrogate.
The
name change is but one example of how Mr. Cruz has de-emphasized his
Latino identity. Unlike Mr. Rubio, Mr. Cruz had only his father and a
few relatives to connect
him to the island, its language and traditions. Once his father became a
born-again Christian, religion, not ethnicity, appeared to dominate the
Cruz household.
“His
approach to all the people with whom we interacted was who they were,
not what they were,” said David K. Panton, Mr. Cruz’s former roommate at
Princeton University
and Harvard Law School.
On
the stump, Mr. Cruz has embraced his Cuban father’s story, more for
what it says about America than what it says about immigrants. His
father fled Cuba with $100 sewn
into his underwear and worked as a dishwasher to help pay tuition at
the University of Texas at Austin. “America, quite simply, saved my
father,” Mr. Cruz wrote.
The
story is a poignant one, but many Latinos have said it falls flat for
one reason: The pride Mr. Cruz feels for his father is not one he
extends to the larger immigrant
community.
“He
doesn’t do anything to suggest to people that he is a Latino senator
from Texas and that he is representing the Latino constituency, the
majority of which is Mexican-American,”
said State Senator Jose Rodríguez, Democrat of Texas. “He doesn’t
identify with the Mexican-American community. The Mexican-American
community doesn’t identify with him.”
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