By: Lee Schlenker

Washington D.C. — Cuba was not a major issue in last November’s midterm elections. But the midterms could have major implications for Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations.

Here are four major takeaways for Cuba policy:

1. The Democrats Can’t Out-Trump Trump on Cuba

Throughout campaign season, Democratic leaders echoed Cold War-era talking points that were practically indistinguishable from those of their Republican counterparts. Many Democratic candidates even went so far as to denigrate their GOP opponents as “Marxists” during campaign season.

While Florida’s GOP is historically associated with hardline positions on Cuba, the state’s Democratic Party has increasingly embraced the anti-communist discourse popular with Florida’s older exiles.

That approach proved to be an unmitigated disaster at the ballot box.

In last month’s midterms, Cuban-American hardliners crushed Florida Democrats who were parroting Republican talking points on Cuba policy. In the 27th district nestled in Miami-Dade county, incumbent Cuban-American congresswoman María Elvira Salazar beat out State Senator Annette Taddeo by 14 points, while Sen. Marco Rubio pummeled Democratic challenger Val Demings by 16 points.

Florida Democratic Party Chair Manny Díaz blamed the defeat on underfunding. But the party’s progressives in the state say the real problem was a flawed strategy. They have demanded his resignation.

The Democrats’ failure to provide an alternative to the “Trump effect” in Florida — fueled by rampant disinformation on social media and the rise of anti-communist influencers targeting recent arrivals from Latin America, among other factors — is why the state is now being deemed a lost cause for the party.

A lot has changed since 2000, when Al Gore lost the presidential election to George W. Bush thanks to a mere 537 votes in Florida. Democrats attributed the razor-thin defeat to disapproval among Cuban Americans over President Clinton’s handling of the Elián González affair.

Twenty-two years later, Democratic strategists, driven by their 2000 “hanging chad” trauma, seem hell-bent on pandering to Cuban-American voters they have no chance of winning over. Even if the Democrats could out-Trump Trump in Miami, the Cuban-American vote is no longer a difference maker in a state now incapable of swinging a national election.

Rather than cozying up to Patria y Vida hardliners seeking regime change in Havana, progressives and even some prominent liberals in Florida are urging the Democrats return to President Obama’s Cuba policy, not only because they have nothing to lose, but because they likely stand to gain.

2. An anti-embargo Democrat can win in Florida

A potential light at the end of the Florida Democrats’ tunnel may well come from the state’s young progressive leaders, like Maxwell Alejandro Frost, elected last month as the youngest member of Congress and its first-ever Gen Zer.

The 25-year-old Orlando gun control activist of Afro-Cuban descent made history last week not only for being the only non-white Cuban-American legislator elected to serve in Washington, but as the only one to oppose the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

Other Cuban-American Democrats – most notably former congressman Joe García – have advocated for a new approach to Cuba policy, but none have gone so far as to publicly condemn the embargo, let alone during campaign season.

Frost is not a socialist, even if endorsed by Bernie Sanders and prominent DSA members. On Twitter and in a recent interview on Democracy Now!, Frost has repeated hardline talking points about Cuba, a country he’s never visited.

Unlike Miami, Frost’s district has relatively few Cuban-American voters. Yet his anti-government posturing may reflect more of a long-term survival strategy in Florida’s charged political environment than his personal views regarding the root of Cuba’s problems.

Nonetheless, Frost’s smooth-sailing victory last month proved that a Democrat opposed to the U.S. embargo can win a race in Florida, debunking long-standing assumptions held by Democratic Party leadership.

The question remains whether Frost can help change the conversation on Cuba policy in Washington or if he’ll get consumed by “the blob.”

3. Cuban-American Democrat hardliners maintain a presence in both houses

If Frost represents the future of the Democratic Party in Washington, Rob Menéndez represents its past. The son of powerful Cuban-American hardliner Sen. Bob Menéndez (D-NJ), Menéndez Jr. cruised easily into his father’s former seat in New Jersey’s 8th district.

Menéndez Jr., who succeeds his father’s ally, fellow Cuban-American Rep. Albio Sires, has no prior political experience, yet he waltzed into the seat with the backing of New Jersey’s Democratic Party political machine. He has not publicly spoken about U.S. policy toward Cuba, which is not surprising given how his district’s historically large Cuban-American population has been overtaken by recent waves of Central and South American migrants.

But if Menéndez Jr.’s foreign policy views are anything like Sires’ or his father’s, then Cuban-American Republican hardliners have secured an invaluable ally on the other side of the aisle. Menéndez Sr., who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sires, a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have walked in lockstep for years with Florida Republicans, securing bipartisan, bicameral support for a pro-sanctions agenda.

Menéndez Jr. had little need to speak publicly since his last name alone all but guaranteed him the congressional seat. But he has expressed a desire to work on foreign policy issues and has praised his father as a “good steward of [U.S.] foreign policy.”

For his part, Menéndez Sr., who is credited with steering Biden’s Cuba policy, doesn’t seem to be retiring anytime soon. 

4. With Florida Now Red, Time to Change Cuba Policy?

Since 2016, Florida has been moving decidedly to the right. The number of registered Republican voters in the state now exceeds Democrat voters by nearly 300,000, and not a single Democrat will hold statewide office for the first time since the late 1800s.

All this begs the question: will the Democrats’ dim prospects in Florida now allow them to stop pandering to Cuban-American hardliners, and free them to pursue a more sensible Cuba policy?

Democratic Party strategists seemed to have forgotten the popularity of Barack Obama’s historic reconciliation with Cuba. Obama’s unprecedented success in South Florida augured an inexorable shift among Cuban-American first- and second-generation immigrants in Florida away from traditionally hardline positions.

After Democrats’ resounding defeat last month in Florida, mainstream media outlets have now begun hinting at the need for the party to return to a more conciliatory Cuba policy.

In the Washington Post, a letter to the editor from a Cuban American in the D.C. area called on Democrats to change their approach to U.S.-Cuba relations:

“We’ve maintained our Cuba policy largely to mollify Cubans in the United States. With last week’s result, it should be clear this no longer has to be the case — they will never vote Democratic anyway,” the letter said.

In a twelve-minute interview on CNN en Español, former congressman Joe García urged Miami Cubans to consider returning to the Obama-era Cuba opening “at all costs.”

And two recent op-eds in the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald encouraged Cuban-American leaders to seek dialogue with the Cuban government on a range of issues. One of them was penned by an ex-ambassador who runs an FIU human rights program funded by hardliner Marcell Felipe.

Cuban Americans tend to follow the leader when it comes to Cuba policy, according to FIU pollster Guillermo Grenier. This, Grenier argues, helps explain why many of the typically independent South Florida voters who were mobilized by Obama’s Cuba policy, swung toward Trump in recent years. They could just as easily swing back if the Democratic Party stops their futile efforts to be tough on Cuba, and instead engages Cuban-American voters on domestic issues like student debt relief, health care, DACA and immigration, according to Grenier.

In recent weeks, it seems the Democrats in Washington have started to get the memo. In an attempt to curb record-breaking migration from Cuba, fueled by U.S. sanctions, Biden green lit high-level migration talks in Havana while pro-engagement legislators have led two Congressional visits to the island.

Despite these advances, Biden has given no indication he plans to reverse course from Trump’s policy, which is now his own.