I’m not sure how this will play with the Jacobin crowd, but in February I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Will Latinos Buy Into ‘Tío Bernie’s’ Socialism?,” coincidentally four days before the 60 Minutes interview with Sanders where he was grilled about his earlier statements regarding Fidel.
Sanders supporters were upset because they thought I was saying there was no way he could win among Latinos because of the socialism issue. What I was saying was that just because Sanders had strong support in the Democratic primaries, it’s not clear that support would translate to strong Latino support in a general election.
The other thing people said was that I was just talking about a small number of Cuban and Venezuelan exiles in South Florida. I think it’s a mistake to put anti-communist Latinos into that box, because you miss how far and wide the anti-socialist message travels among all Latino groups.
All Latino national groups have their version of anti-communism. The Puerto Rican Republicans have always looked at the independistas, Puerto Ricans advocating for the independence of the island, as radical Marxists. There are these critical episodes in the early 1950s where activists bombed the governor’s mansion in San Juan, Lolita Lebron opens fire on congress, they shoot through a window near the White House where Eisenhower was taking a nap. They are all labeled, in the context of the Cold War, as “radical communists.” So, Puerto Rican conservatives have their own version of anti-communism.
Same thing with Mexican immigrants whose families came in the 1920s after the Mexican Revolution. They see the 1917 constitution as a Marxist-inspired document because of land redistribution and the way it stripped the Catholic church of its authority. Many Mexicans have their own version of anti-communism.
I think it’s a mistake to think that you can put Latino conservatives who have strongly anti-communist views into a box in South Florida, limiting it to Cubans and Venezuelans. As you note in your question, there is a much longer history dating back to the earliest days of the Cold War and continuing into the present.
One thing that’s amazing to me is how the anti-communist message gets passed along from one group to another. In the 1980s, when the Sandinistas and Contras are fighting in Nicaragua, veterans of the Bay of Pigs are training Contras in Miami. Part of the reason Cuban-American politicians like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen become the champions of Nicaraguan refugees is because of the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs trying to oust Castro. Cuban Americans said they fully understand the plight of Nicaraguan refugees because they experienced the same things two decades earlier. I think that idea gets passed down from one group to another across time.
You’re seeing it play out now with how Hispanic Republicans think about the Democratic Socialists of America and people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I listened to Ted Cruz give a speech in 2018 at a gathering in DC of the Latino Coalition, an advocacy group for small business owners looking to grow their businesses and secure government or private loans. Cruz, in a single breath, mentioned Fidel Castro, Nicolas Maduro, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. It’s a flat narrative about socialism that has managed to resonate for the last seventy years.
I think there’s this idea that now that Fidel is gone, a younger generation of Cuban Americans, whose experiences weren’t defined by the Cold War, will be more progressive. That assumption underestimates how deep the narrative is. We saw how even younger Cubans supported Trump in the recent election.
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