Of demographics and drift - 'The re-Cubanization of Miami' and waning support for the embargo

Posted on Tuesday, 06.17.14



Of demographics and drift: 'The re-Cubanization of Miami' and waning

support for the embargo

A small majority of Cuban Americans supports lifting the embargo against

Cuba, according to a poll by Florida International University.

BY MARC CAPUTO AND JUAN O. TAMAYO

JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM



More Miami-Dade Cubans than ever support lifting the embargo and travel

sanctions on the island nation, according to a new Florida International

University poll that attributes much of the change to younger Cubans and

new arrivals.



The poll, which drew some quick criticisms, also indicated that a

majority of Cubans in the county favor full U.S.-Cuba diplomatic

relations. Fewer than 50 percent said they send remittances to Cuba or

have relatives who do so.



In an unexplained contradiction, however, a majority of Cubans polled

also favored keeping the nation on the U.S. list of countries that

support international terrorism, a list that carries banking sanctions

well beyond those in the U.S. embargo.



Since 1991, when FIU first began polling Cubans, its surveys have shown

that support for the embargo has steadily declined by 39 percentage

points while support for unrestricted travel has increased 25 points.



"The engine driving change is demographics," said Guillermo Grenier, who

helped conduct the 1,000-respondent survey on behalf of the university's

Cuban Research Institute. "We are moving into a period of

re-Cubanization of Miami."



Grenier said recent arrivals and younger Cubans increasingly favor

improved relations with the island. At the same time, the major backers

of the embargo and sanctions — older Cubans — are decreasing in number.

Today, about 860,000 Cubans live in Miami-Dade,



One-third of all Cuban residents of Miami-Dade arrived after 1995, and

arrivals since that year have been on the rise because of favorable U.S.

immigration policies, Grenier added. President Obama also has eased many

restrictions on traveling or sending money to Cuba, which has increased

ties between the two nations.



On the embargo, the pollsters said 52 percent opposed it and 48 favored

it — a tie in a survey with a margin of error of 3.12 points. Those

numbers continued the downward trend in support of the embargo shown by

the previous FIU polls: 87 percent in 1991, 78 percent in 1997, 66

percent in 2004 and 56 percent in 2011.



Grenier acknowledged his numbers reflect only those respondents who said

they favored or opposed the embargo and did not include "don't know/no

answer" replies. Including those numbers in the tally would change the

percentages to 45-41 against the embargo — short of a majority and with

12 percent replying "don't know/no answer."



But leaving out the don't know/no answers — and reporting percentages as

if those numbers didn't exist — raised eyebrows among other pollsters.



"What you're telling me is unusual. Really unique. Very, very extremely

rare," David Hill, a nationally known pollster with Hill Research

Consultants in Washington D.C., said of FIU's method. "The 'unsures'

tell us many things about an issue: how strongly people feel about it,

how well an issue is known."



Grenier's fellow FIU professor, Hugh Gladwin, who helped conduct the

study, said the university's Cuba poll always reported the embargo and

travel sanctions numbers in the same way since 1991, so the trend of

diminishing support for the sanctions is consistent.



The poll also came under fire from pro-sanctions lobbyist Mauricio

Claver-Carone, who questioned the fairness of the survey because of the

two entities that financed it: the Trimpa Group and the Open Society

Foundation, both strongly involved in efforts to improve relations with

Havana.



Said Grenier in a response: "Even to suggest that is kind of insulting."



Other polls also have indicated a shift toward normalizing relations

with Cuba among those of Cuban descent as well as among Florida voters.

A Public Policy Polling survey of Florida voters found they supported

lifting the embargo 53-22 percent.



FIU's results differed somewhat from those of a Miami Herald/el Nuevo

Herald poll by Bendixen & Amandi International published last week that

showed 56 percent of 305 registered Miami-Dade Cuban-American voters

favored the embargo and 36 percent opposed it. But the two polls

reported their numbers differently and have different sample sizes and

methodologies.



The FIU poll also showed 67 percent of the 1,000 Miami-Dade Cubans

surveyed favored lifting all U.S. restrictions on travel to the island,

while 30 percent opposed it and 3 percent had "no opinion/no answer."



As in the question about the embargo, the percentages of those who

opposed the travel sanctions increased among the younger and more recent

arrivals.



FIU's survey also showed 68 percent of the registered Cuban American

voters — 62 percent of the respondents said they are U.S. citizens and

90 percent of those said they are registered to vote — favor full

diplomatic relations with Havana, broken since the early 1960s.



Another 81 percent said they would vote for candidates who favor

replacing the embargo with a focus on human rights. And 57 percent would

back candidates who favor replacing the embargo with a policy of support

for private economic activity in Cuba.



Those responses indicate that most Cubans in the county are increasingly

"willing to try something new, but not let Cuba off the hook," said Grenier.



Not surprisingly, strong majorities of all those polled by FIU supported

the "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy and the Cuban Adjustment Act, which both

favor Cuban migrants. The former allows any Cubans who set foot on U.S.

land to remain, and the latter grants them U.S. residence after just

✔366 days in the country.



Asked about political and economic changes under Raúl Castro, who took

power after his brother Fidel Castro underwent surgery in 2006, Cubans

in Miami-Dade indicated that they remained skeptical.



About 52 percent said they would be willing to invest in the island,

with the more recent arrivals being more enthusiastic but having the

least capital to invest. Another 34 percent said there will never be

political changes, while 13 percent believe they are already taking place.



On remittances, the 48 percent who said they send money or have

relatives who send money to Cuba also tended to be concentrated among

the post-1995 arrivals. A report last year claimed that up to 62 percent

of Miami-Dade Cubans send cash to the island.



The criticisms of the poll underlined the difficulties of carrying out

public opinion surveys on a topic as complex and controversial as U.S.

policies toward Cuba.



In FIU's 2007 poll, a then-record low of 57.5 percent favored keeping

the embargo. Yet 71 percent also said they favored exile military

attacks on Cuba, and 51 percent favored a U.S. military invasion of

Cuba. Those questions were not asked in the latest poll.



Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami Republican who favors sanctions on

Havana, said she regretted that FIU's "misguided poll … will be seized

by many to call for increased relations with the murderous Castro regime."



But ✔Ric Herrero, executive director of the nonprofit Cuba Now group

that wants a "new policy" toward the island, said the poll reflects what

he's seeing.



"This poll is the latest in a series that dismantles long-held

perceptions about the Cuban-American community in Miami-Dade County,"

Herrero said in a statement. "The Cuban-American community is ready to

embrace alternatives, recognizing that it's possible to both help their

families and friends back home expand socio-economic opportunities,

while at the same time exerting pressure on the regime in Havana over

human rights."



Source: Of demographics and drift: 'The re-Cubanization of Miami' and

waning support for the embargo - Cuba - MiamiHerald.com -

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/17/4183393/poll-support-for-warmer-relations.html