If you live outside South Florida, it can look like a contradiction. Cuban Americans, many of whom fled a dictatorship or are the children of people who did, keep voting for a president who talks about deporting people and praises strongmen. Some people online have gone further and asked what’s wrong with Cubans. That’s the wrong question. The numbers tell a more interesting story.
Florida International University’s annual Cuba Poll, released in late October, found that 76% of Miami Cubans oppose deporting Cubans with no criminal record who lack legal status, the Miami Herald reported. Yet more than two-thirds said they still planned to vote Republican in the congressional races, WLRN reported.
Do Cuban Americans support Trump’s deportations?
Most don’t, at least not for people like their own relatives. More than three-fourths disapprove of deporting Cubans without criminal records, and WLRN described the community as angry that so many Cuban migrants have been detained and deported. Miami Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar even told Trump he’d “gone too far” on immigration in a campaign ad.
Why do so many keep voting Republican?
Because for many Cuban Americans, the vote is about Havana as much as Washington. The same poll found 77% support Trump’s maximum economic pressure on Cuba’s government, more than 60% favor keeping the embargo, and almost three-fourths would support U.S. military action to remove the regime. The Republican Party is the one that has matched that hard line, and this fall Florida even charged Raúl Castro with murder conspiracy over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.
“The Republican brand has simply become too deep a part of the Cuban voter identity here,” said FIU sociologist Guillermo Grenier, who directs the poll. “And if Democrats are ever going to change that, they’re going to have to learn to play a much longer ground game and build much stronger leadership in the community.”
So the answer to “do they like dictators” is no. For a lot of older Cuban voters, opposing one specific dictatorship is the whole point, and they see the GOP as the party most committed to that fight, even when they disagree with it on immigration. The same poll found almost three-fourths support unrestricted food and medicine sales to the island, which shows how much nuance gets lost from the outside.
Is the Cuban vote starting to shift?
A little, and it showed on Tuesday. In heavily Cuban precincts in Westchester and Hialeah, Republican Byron Donalds ran about 10 points behind Trump’s 2024 result, a Miami Herald analysis found. “That’s a hard sell to someone who thinks you want to deport his cousin,” Republican consultant Giancarlo Sopo told the Herald. Even a business can get pulled in: a Miami bakery that hosted Hakeem Jeffries was accused online of backing socialism.
The BeezLoop Take
Treating Cuban Americans as a punchline misses what’s actually happening. This is a community voting on a decades-old fight with a regime that jailed and exiled their families, and the party that speaks loudest about that fight gets their vote.
But loyalty has limits. When deportations reach your cousin, the hard line starts to look different, and Tuesday’s numbers in Hialeah and Westchester show it. Republicans who assume the Cuban vote is permanent are making the same mistake Democrats made with Latino voters in 2024.
The open question: will Democrats build the long-term presence in Miami that Grenier says it would take, or keep showing up only in election years?
Sources: WLRN · Miami Herald via Yahoo News · FIU Cuba Poll 2026 · NBC News (video)
