"Prodical Son: Marco Rubio's Complicated Cuban Legacy"...Quite an EyeOpener on the MSM's Favorite

Prodigal Son: Marco Rubio’s complicated Cuban legacy.

By Ann Louise Bardach

November/December 2015

Pedro Victor did leave for Miami again in the summer of 1962, where he became mired in a long immigration process, files ferreted out by Roig-Franzia, owing to suspicions of U.S. authorities as to why he returned to Cuba in the first place. Ignoring a deportation order (as many undocumented immigrants do today), Pedro Victor simply stayed in the United States and was eventually able to become a permanent resident in 1967, following the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act.

Like many Cuban-Americans, Pedro Victor, “Papá,” as he was known to Rubio and his family, had been an avowed Democrat—only to be devastated when John F. Kennedy undercut the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 by withholding U.S. air power. That “betrayal,” believed by exiles to have cost them the return of their homeland, led them into the arms of the GOP—a mass defection that would haunt Democratic presidential prospects for decades.

“When I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba, [Papá] narrated the life of José Marti and the heroics of the Mambises, who had won Cuba’s independence,” Rubio recalled in his 2012 memoir, a book written with Senator John McCain’s ghostwriter Mark Salter.

Rubio’s rewriting of his family story is telling and, even politically, understandable. By 1990, when Rubio caught the bug for politics, Cuban exiles had transformed from being those “yearning to breathe free” to being the indisputable power players of Miami-Dade, Florida’s most-populous county—dominating not only elections at every level, but also businesses from real estate development to government contracts. “The Cubans built Miami,” explains Salvador Lew, a former head of Radio Marti. “The Jews built Miami Beach,” adding with a laugh, “And the Jubans [Cuban Jews] did both!”

While cubanidad—one’s Cuban identity in the diaspora—was the main entrée card to Miami’s political elite, it was far better to have arrived post-Castro and thus be able to call oneself a Cuban exile, as opposed to being merely an immigrant. El exilio historico denoted being in the first wave of post-Castro arrivals, a group that generally was wealthier and whiter than those who came later, and implied an iron-fisted hard line when it came to la lucha against Fidel and Raul Castro. Its very identity rested upon being political and ideological refugees, not economic ones. And from this distinction arose a panoply of privileges, including a unique and unprecedented immigration policy known informally as “The Cuban Exception.”

By 1980, exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the Cuban American National Foundation, had become a national political power broker working closely with President Ronald Reagan, who created Radio and TV Marti with his insistent urging. Cuban exiles were no longer just calling the shots in Miami; they were players in the White House and in the National Security Council—with a lobbying arm that rivaled, indeed was modeled on, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In the years since, Cuban exiles have been the most successful Hispanic force in U.S. politics: All three of the Hispanics in the U.S. Senate today are Cuban-American: Rubio, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez and Texas Republican Ted Cruz, whose father was Cuban-born. In fact, since 1976, four of the five Hispanics elected to the U.S. Senate have been Cuban-Americans.

CONTINUED....A LONG READ....but, FASCINATING at:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/marco-rubio-profile-213275?o=2