Florida's Cubano voters, while coveted, are hardly united

MIAMI, Fla. - Any serious Republican candidate trolling for votes in Florida is bound, at some point, to make the pilgrimage to Versailles. The restaurant in the heart of Little Havana is the town square of Miami's Cubano community. Like Philadelphia's Geno's or the Famous Deli, it is where politicians go to get down with the people and pose with the specialty of the house.

Instead of cheesesteaks and Reubens, here it's the coffee, served thick and sweet as the political rhetoric.

Newt Gingrich came by a few days ago to shake hands and sip a cafecito, said Victor Marina, 46, an electrical engineer. "I just missed him."

Voters like Marina, a Florida-born son of Cuban exiles, can tip the balance in a race as tight as Tuesday's Republican presidential primary, where the winner scoops up all 50 delegates.

"This is an interesting week - the point of maximum leverage for the hard-liners," said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at the nonpartisan Lexington Institute.

Most of the 367,844 registered Republicans in Miami-Dade County are Cuban Americans, and most of them will vote, said Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor and principal investigator for the Cuba Poll at Florida International University.

Which is why Gingrich and Mitt Romney have been courting Cubanos in debates, during radio interviews, and while glad-handing around town.

Not that the community doesn't appreciate the attention, but the fawning is getting to be a little much.

After breakfast with a friend at Versailles this week, Marina said he could see through the candidates' attempt at one-upmanship over whether Fidel Castro is headed to heaven or hell, and their hints that the U.S. military might one day help topple the dictatorial regime.

"They're just catering to the Cuban crowd," he said.

The hard sell is unneeded, at least for Marina's vote. He's been a Gingrich supporter all along. "I don't think Romney can really seal the deal. He's too wishy-washy."

The latest polls show Gingrich and Romney running neck and neck statewide. Florida International's research finds Romney maintaining a lead among Cuban Americans, Grenier said.

For decades, would-be presidents have tried to win votes here by delivering swashbuckling anti-Castro promises and pledges of allegiance to the United States' long-standing embargo on Cuban trade and travel.

"They say things they think the Cubans want to hear," Grenier said. "They kick into this old-guard, hard-line rhetoric. And there are a substantial number of people who still hold that hard line."

In the Versailles bakery cafe, Eddy Hernandez joined five of his friends around a table for two. All are in their 70s, born and raised in Cuba and transplanted to Florida in the 1950s and '60s. They had polished off their coffee and pastries, chosen from a display case that features four kinds of flan (one, flan diplomatico, is part cake) and fat wedges of cheesecake iced with crushed guava.

The place is full of clusters of men like them, speaking Spanish. The menus and signs are in Spanish, too.

Hernandez, 77, was 22 when he left Havana. He worked in Miami as a tour bus driver. Others at his table were a butcher, an aviation mechanic, and an administrator for the Federal Reserve.

All are Republican.

"I came here for freedom," Hernandez said in Spanish. "Not for anything else." If someday democracy returns to Cuba, "I'll go back. I love America, but Cuba is my homeland."

Though he used Florida's early-voting option to cast his vote for Romney, he said, "Gingrich is good, too. He'll do something for Cuba."

That something, he and his friends agreed, is to enforce the embargo.

Hernandez remembered Castro's rise to power as a storm blowing in and worsening as time went on. "Havana was the most beautiful city. Warm and clean. The happiness we had there. The peace," he said. Both his parents worked in factories. They kept their jobs, but food became scarce. And the defense committees had spies in each neighborhood. "If a friend came to visit, you would be asked, 'What was he doing there?' "

In 1967, Hernandez escaped to Mexico, got a green card to come to America, and two years later brought his parents and sister to join him.

Though neither he nor most of his friends are fluent in English, he said he did not mind the candidates' proposal to make English the official language. "It's their country. They can do what they want."

All his relatives in Cuba are gone now, increasingly the case for exiles of his generation. That is one reason older Cuban Americans are unfazed by travel restrictions the Republican candidates want to reinstate.

And it is one of many philosophical rifts in a community that politicians may mistakenly view as single-minded, Grenier said.

The younger generation - recent immigrants as well as older exiles' children who grew up here - tends to favor greater openness in U.S. relations with Cuba. And like Jewish voters who don't consider Israel their first priority, they are more focused on their lives as Americans.

"If you look at polls of the community as a whole, you see increasingly over the years it is taking on more moderate views toward Cuba," the Lexington Institute's Peters said. "Advocating more dialogue with the government and more travel. But that's not the view that shows up at the polls."

He said that's because many recent immigrants have not yet become citizens and because younger Cuban American voters - like other young voters - aren't as religious as their elders about exercising their franchise.

"I believe the exile community is a house divided," Henry Rojas said as he headed to his truck after a coffee at Versailles. Rojas, 33, works in marketing for Comcast. His parents immigrated from Cuba in the 1950s. "I was a Republican during the Reagan era, but you open up to things." He cites the Iraq war and George W. Bush's economic policies as reasons for his shift.

"To be honest, I don't like any of the Republican candidates. Look at the mess Obama had to clean up," he said, adding that the latest wooing of Cubano votes bordered on insulting.

"We're not stupid. They're pandering," Rojas said. "Everybody knows it."

The travel policy. One of the biggest issues splintering Little Havana - and a potential factor in the fall election - is the current policy allowing unlimited visits to relatives back home. Under President George W. Bush, only those with siblings or parents in Cuba could go - and even then, only once every three years.

President Obama lifted those restrictions.

In recent polls, almost 70 percent of Cuban Americans who responded said they wanted to freely visit the island, and 60 percent wanted unrestricted travel for all Americans.

On Thursday morning, travelers booked on SkyKing Airlines Flight 252 to Havana filled Concourse G at Miami International Airport.

"Castro has done his damage," said Pedro Cruz, in line for the 45-minute flight. "I hate the guy. He's ruined my family's life. But me not going to Cuba to see my family is not going to help Castro. . .. The country is in ruins. My family lives in a shack with a tin roof. They survive on what we give them. Clothing. Food. Medicine."

Cruz moved to Florida in 1968 with his parents, who opened several restaurants. Now 46 and a technician for Miami's public transit system, he said he believed that after 50 years, the embargo was a proven failure. Under Bush, he could visit only by flying through a third country, which made the trip longer and costlier. Since the restrictions were lifted, he has gone back to Cuba a half-dozen times.

On this trip, he was going to see his uncle, who is dying of throat cancer. "Most of us think it was very unfair that everyone else could go visit their country," Cruz said, "but we couldn't visit ours."

Inquirer politics writer Thomas Fitzgerald contributed to this article.