“I’ve been here for 17 years,” he said. “We lived through the same things. We speak the same language. And we are living through the same signs that we saw in the flesh in our country. So we recognize the things that are happening.”

Those views are shared by people like Giancarlo Sopo, a Cuban-American who became known in Miami in his 20s for working in Democratic politics. He now works as a campaign spokesman for Mr. Trump.

“Our families fled socialism, we are culturally conservative, the president’s policies are popular in our community and we like his mano dura against the left,” Mr. Sopo said in a statement, using the phrase for iron fist. “The Democrats have always had far-left voices, but its leaders were once wise enough to keep them at bay. Now they extol them as ‘the future’ of the party, which is why many of us consider ourselves a part of its past.”

Guillermo J. Grenier, a sociology professor at Florida International University who conducts a biennial poll of Miami’s Cuban-American community, found for the first time this year that a majority of Cubans who arrived between 2010 and 2015, the most recent dates to qualify for U.S. citizenship, are registering as Republicans. Cuban-Americans born in the United States “are going the other way,” he said, with 40 percent registering Republican, 35 percent Democrat and 24 percent without party affiliation.

“The Republican Party is really well-established in the Cuban communities, and when new Cubans are coming in now, they don’t see a muted Republican Party like you had under Obama,” Dr. Grenier said.

His poll has also shown that Cuban-American attitudes tend to swing with the policies of the party that holds the White House: They opposed diplomatic relations under former President George W. Bush, reversed their feelings under Mr. Obama and again returned to Bush-era attitudes under Mr. Trump.

“What it shows is that Cubans adjust,” Dr. Grenier said. “Whoever is in Washington, Cubans reflect foreign policy — they don’t create it.”

Source: New York Times

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