Prodigal Son: Marco Rubio’s complicated Cuban legacy

[flamingdem]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/marco-rubio-profile-213275

* He's ten years too late, people don't want to go back in time on Cuba and he'll have to kiss Miami right wing ass

At first glance, Marco Rubio seems to be the boy wonder of 2016. On stage during the debates and at campaign appearances, he appears young, handsome, almost cherubic. But anyone who thinks that Rubio is naive, soft or inexperienced would be mistaken. Behind the baby-face features is a street-smart Miami politician and a former football player for whom politics is a contact sport. The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio has made his family story the anthem of all his political campaigns. As told on the campaign trail, it is a moving and compelling story—a hardscrabble, up-from-the-bootstraps, American family saga. His father worked ceaseless shifts as a bartender, his mother scrubbed floors as a hotel maid—all in a single-minded pursuit of a better life for their children in America.

Rubio’s narrative, though, belies a more complicated reality, as the most prominent Hispanic politician in the United States balances his own past with his party’s future. Incubated within Miami’s unique political ecosystem, mentored and guided by el exilio historico, the old guard, he’s risen from Calle Ocho to Tallahassee to Washington. Now Rubio has arrived on the national stage just as U.S.-Cuban relations have shifted dramatically. While he has never visited his ancestral homeland of Cuba, it has defined and influenced every part of his life. And in a wild-card twist of fate, the largest island in the Caribbean has emerged from its half-century cocoon of isolation just in time to play a potentially decisive role in Rubio’s quest to capture the GOP presidential nomination.

Certainly, the rise of the junior U.S. senator from the Sunshine State owes much to the formidable Cuban-American Miami machine. Cuban-Americans generally call themselves exiles—not immigrants—a nod to having been the tossed-out refuse of Fidel Castro, who labeled them gusanos (worms) and escoria (scum). Since the early 1960s, they have morphed into Miami’s kingmakers, deciding state and local elections while dictating national policy on Cuba to U.S. presidents for decades.

As the most successful scion of that power structure, the freshman senator, who has taken an unrelenting hard line on the Castro brothers and on immigration, finds himself confronting deep fault lines with his fellow Hispanics, a new generation of Cuban-Americans
and even a U.S. president who sees reestablishing ties to the island as one of his signature accomplishments. Today, the 44-year-old is caught between an older intransigent generation of Cuban-Americans who are passing from the scene and a younger, growing generation of Central and Latin American Hispanics who face a very different immigrant experience in the U.S. and who resent the special treatment afforded his fellow Cubans.




Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/marco-rubio-profile-213275#ixzz3q6yuSZ9Q

[flamingdem]

1. kcik