Following the 2024 presidential election, Liberal reproaches and hot takes came fast and furious at Cuban Americans. We were racists, hypocrites, sheep, class traitors, fools voting against our own interests. But I won’t critique my community in this essay. I do that plenty and with far more nuance and humor than the talking heads, and I have the death threats to prove it.

Many elements contributed to Cuban Americans’ rightward shift over the last decade. They are well-documented in Paola Ramos’ excellent book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. These include religion, colonization, a deep desire to assimilate, and fraught racial relations both in Cuba and the U.S. However, I want to focus on two particularly salient factors: trauma and anger.

Many Cuban Americans—I’d wager a majority—associate the trauma we, our parents, and/or our grandparents experienced with socialism, not necessarily authoritarianism. We had many despotic presidents following independence such as Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista. Cuba only experienced a handful of years of real democracy throughout its entire history. However, it was Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution that seized our property, jailed and murdered our family and friends, and forced us to restart our lives in a foreign country.

This trauma is very real, even three generations removed from the Revolution, and explaining it to Liberals is horrible. I can’t count how many times a Democrat stopped me cold while I recounted my family’s experiences to “correct” me. The Cuban Revolution did amazing things for Cubans. Only criminals and collaborators were shot. Exiles are all gangsters and oligarchs. For a party rightfully concerned with red states’ textbook revisionism, there sure are a lot of Liberals happy to erase my history. And it’s not just rank and file Democrats, but their leaders as well.

Many commentators believe my community’s distaste for the Democratic Party stems solely from President John F. Kennedy’s desertion of 1,100 Cuban Americans on the sands and in the mangrove forests of the Bay of Pigs. Though there is some truth to that (I personally dislike JFK’s cult of personality), Democrats precipitated Cubans Americans’ flight from their party much more recently, as proven by the fact that Hilary Clinton won half our vote.

When Fidel Castro finally died just two weeks after the 2016 election, he left behind a brutal legacy in the form of half a century of authoritarian repression. Tens of thousands of Cuban Americans, including me, took to the streets to celebrate. But, as illustrated by Bernie Sanders, Karen Bass, and Karen Lee, prominent Democratic lawmakers just couldn’t help praising the dead dictator. This was beyond disrespectful to my community. It felt like a conscious negation of our lived experiences.

Furthermore, while Cuban Americans participated in a spontaneous, cathartic, nonpartisan release of 50 years of pain and frustration, the Black Lives Matter Twitter account published a post reading, “Rest in Power #FidelCastro.” This was followed by an essay that waxed poetic on his global contributions and ended with “Vive Fidel!” without acknowledging the wanton destruction he caused.

I will caveat my subsequent statement by acknowledging that the BLM movement is not a monolith. That account did not speak for the myriad chapters located across the country. However, I struggle to type words describing just how galling the tweet and its timing were. It was a flippant, wholesale erasure of 13 million people’s pain, including that of millions of Afro-Cubans. And it permanently turned off many in my community to BLM, despite its laudatory goals.

At the height of nationwide protests against police brutality at the turn of the 2020s, a similar effort swept Cuba. The San Isidro movement began when artists, academics, and dissidents organized and marched to end the Cuban government’s sweeping censorship laws and repression of their civil rights. It soon exploded across the island, driving hundreds of thousands of people into the streets who were fed up with the police state. The Cuban American community in South Florida responded in kind with enormous solidarity marches.

Most prominent Liberal civil rights and political organizations in the U.S. did not opine on San Isidro at all. They did not draw parallels to similar stateside protests or provide rhetorical support for the Cuban people’s grassroots fight against dictatorship. However, the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida sure had something to say, and it placed the blame squarely on the U.S. embargo. Let me reiterate. The Democratic Progressive Caucus of the state with the largest Cuban American population published a press release that refused to critique the daily military and police brutality the Cuban government perpetrated against its own people. It didn’t even deign an expression of support for the Cubans in the street.

Cuban Americans are rightfully furious at the Democratic Party. It claims to fight authoritarianism in the U.S. while many of its most prominent figures and affiliated organizations praise or ignore it in Cuba. Self-righteous assertions of combating oligarchy here while extolling a princely cadre at the head of a literal police state 90 miles from Florida’s shores would be laughable if they weren’t so maddening. This is why Liberals’ clumsy attempts at comparing Trump to Castro fall utterly flat. My community remembers the seemingly infinite times, great and small, public and personal, when Democrats praised a real authoritarian—one who killed our families, fractured our community, and scarred our collective consciousness for generations.

I’ve read the comments on my posts. Every time I call out MAGA hypocrisy among wider Latinidad, a flood of Liberal vitriol pours in insisting I should only focus on Cubans. But guess what? It’s not just the Cubans.

Here’s the wild thing my community: we talk to other Latinos, in Spanish and English. Those with similar histories of socialist authoritarianism and/or conflict see parallels with how we’ve been treated by the Left. Is it therefore any wonder that Trump went from losing Doral—which has the country’s largest Venezuelan American population—to winning 62% of its vote in 2024? A similar rightward shift occurred among Nicaraguan and Colombian Americans, who also moved dramatically to the Right.

Most Democratic operatives and activists wrote off the Cuban American community a decade ago. They instead focused their resources on Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, even Texas, for God’s sake. Well, they lost them all, including all seven swing states. Democrats could still win Cuban Americans back. Republicans sure did. I even wrote an essay outlining how to do it. But they need to start now. Not in two years. Not in 2028. Now.

I don’t want to be a Democrat. I barely feel welcome by the party in South Florida and not at all without. But I can’t be a Republican. The GOP’s assault on queer, Black, immigrant, and women’s rights, its gleeful destruction of democratic norms, its callous disregard for anyone outside the anointed in-group, and its negation of existential scientific facts make it morally impossible for me to vote R.

So, my party affiliation is one of exclusion. I was not inspired to join the Dems by a persuasive vision for Cuban Americans. The choice was forced on me despite the party’s historic antagonism toward my people. I’m stuck with them and I’m not happy about it. One shouldn’t need much imagination to guess how the rest of my community feels.

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Andrew Otazo

'Miami Creation Myth' author Andrew Otazo has advised officials on Cuba policy, worked for the Mexican president, fired a tank, and ran with 30lbs of trash.

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