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President Donald Trump’s great victory in Florida owes much to his strident denunciation of leftist governments in Latin America, which resonated loud and clear among conservative Hispanics in the southeastern state.
In Florida, this demographic is led by Cubans who loathe the communist government in Havana, against which Trump took a hard line during his presidency and campaign for the White House.
In Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, dozens of Cubans listened to salsa and waved American flags Tuesday night as they celebrated Trump’s victory in Florida and his rich prize of 29 electoral votes.
The state, famous for its tight presidential races, was seen as pivotal to Trump’s reelection against Democrat Joe Biden.
Outside the famous Café Versailles, a popular song in Spanish sounded urging people to vote for Trump.
“Freedom for Cuba!” a woman screamed as television crews filmed her.
Trump won Florida for his anti-communist rhetoric and also for his popularity with rural whites, experts said.
“Democrats lost the Hispanic vote. Not only among Cubans. Also Venezuelans, Argentines, Bolivians, Colombians. They are all pro-Trump here,” said Eduardo Gamarra, professor of political science at Florida International University (FIU).
The anti-racism protests that swept the United States after the police assassination of George Floyd in May did not persuade Florida Latinos to vote for Biden, who unlike Trump supports the Black Lives Matter movement, as they do not identify with blacks in the United States. Gamarra said.
South Americans living in Florida tend to come from the middle and upper class in their home countries, the academic said.
“But Latinos in the rest of the country have a different image of themselves because of their social origin, and they are more committed to the debate on civil rights,” he said.
According to Gamarra, Black Lives Matter really hurt Biden among Latinos in the Sunshine State.
– ‘Praying’ for Trump to win –
Take Carlos Rizo, a Cuban who was watching the elections return at home and “praying” that Trump would win.
He said Black Lives Matter is a left-wing tactic to undermine democracy, a view that is not uncommon among Latinos in the state.
“Everyone knows what Black Lives Matter is and what they have caused,” Rizo, a 53-year-old truck driver, told AFP.
He said Democrats used BLM and the flexible leftist group Antifa “to create panic and terror.”
Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU, said that it is not only Hispanics, who represent 20 percent of the electorate in the Sunshine State, who drove Trump’s victory.
You can win without them if you enlist the support of rural Floridians, Duany said.
But the “close relationship” that Trump cultivated with the Cuban and Venezuelan communities in Miami paid off, he said.
“Those two groups are not decisive when it comes to overall victory, but they must have tipped the scales in Trump’s favor,” Duany said.
Biden was slow to campaign in Florida and was slow to react to Trump’s description of him as the face of the far left who would usher in socialism in America, he added.
lm / dw / mdo
