President George W. Bush, who professes to be a true believer in the power of the family, may feel that power from Florida come Election Day.
But not in the way that he might expect.
According to ABCnews.com, scores of Cubans are working the phones from across the Florida Straits. They are urging their relatives in the battleground state of Florida to vote for Democratic challenger John Kerry for president.
They are doing so not at the urging of their president, Fidel Castro, whose government has already called the U.S. elections a sham. What’s driving Cubans on the island to get into the elections fray isn’t propaganda, but pain – the pain of a Bush administration policy that, among other things, only allows their relatives in the United States to visit them once every three years.
The new policy, enacted last May, is basically a tightening of the failed, four-decade-old embargo against Cuba. It was influenced by the hard-line, mostly white Cuban exiles that are among Bush’s staunchest constituents and is, laughably, designed to bring Castro down. Unfortunately, though, Cuban families – most of whom are Afro-Cuban – have wound up as the casualties of that ill-conceived policy.
And they aren’t tolerating it in silence.
The phone traffic between the 11 million Cuba residents and the 800,000 Cubans in Florida has been thick, a phone operator in Cuba told ABC. No doubt, the lines are filled with the voices of Cubans like Amilia, a homemaker who is urging her family in Miami to vote for Kerry.
“My family in Miami never votes. They are not interested. I told them they had to get rid of Bush, and they all promised to go vote against him,” she told ABC.
It’s also a safe bet that a chunk of those calls are coming from Afro-Cubans. They make up more than 60 percent of Cuba’s population. Unlike the white exiles whose entire families ultimately left Cuba in the 1960s after the revolution, the Afro-Cubans who have relatives in the United States are more likely to have kinfolk who arrived here more recently. Their families still span the Florida Straits.
But Bush apparently missed that in all the pandering.
For his part, Kerry has promised to rescind the policy if elected, saying that it trashes family values. While Bush is still expected to get a majority of the Cuban-American vote, some observers believe that unhappiness with his policy could force enough Cuban-Americans to vote against him and cut into his margin enough to win Florida for Kerry.
That, of course, remains to be seen.
But it’s a shame that Bush, who bills himself as a champion of families, forces Cuban families to take a back seat to politics.
It’s a shame that the man who has pushed for billions of dollars for his so-called Healthy Marriage Initiative – an initiative that sees marriage, not jobs, as the solution to poverty – doesn’t have a problem with the fact that under his Cuba policy, Cubans whose spouses dwell on opposite sides of the straits will only be able to see each other once every three years.
Or that Cuban sons and daughters will only be able to visit their parents in Cuba once every three years. And vice versa.
That can’t be healthy for marriage or families, in any country.
Worse than that, it’s a shame that Bush only sees Cubans – as well as people in other struggling countries – through the prism of self-interest and ideology. It’s a shame that he doesn’t understand that his brand of paternalism in Cuba is not only hurting families, but it is further fraying the already fragile bonds between our countries.
I hope that the Cubans who are incensed by Bush’s policies can encourage enough of their U.S. relatives to vote against him to make him clear out of the White House in January. Because for Cubans, Bush’s brand of hypocrisy doesn’t reinforce family ties.
Just political ones.
