My mother came to the U.S. from Cuba as child refugee with Operation Pedro Pan in 1962, living in foster homes and a camp run by Catholic Charities until her parents were able to follow three years later. She is politically moderate, but Papi Cruz’s speech was more than familiar to me, from visits to Miami and time spent with family members who are also Cuban exiles. Even my father, a Salvadoran, half-jokingly calls the president a communist.
“Ese Obama es comunista!” an old woman screamed at me once out of the blue, when I was in Miami during the 2012 presidential election. I hadn’t said a word to her. I was tying my shoelaces, about to go for a jog, and looked up to see her standing over me.
“You young people,” she said. “You want a movie star. You didn’t live what we lived.”
Apparently Marco Rubio also knows a thing or two about these kinds of conversations. In an interview with GQ in 2012, Rubio says, “I’m not making any comparison between Barack Obama and Castro from Cuba — but I was raised in a community of people who were told that if government had more power it could equalize things and it could give them more than others, and at the minimum undo some of the unfair things that had been done to them, and they were very skeptical of that given the experience that they had had.”