How Marco Rubio’s Cuban roots explain his campaign — and what kind of president he would be

Marco Rubio announces his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in April 2015 in Miami. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)

MIAMI — Announcing his 2016 presidential bid at the historic Freedom Tower here Monday, Sen. Marco Rubio dismissed “the leaders and ideas of the past” and insisted that “we must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them.”

It was a not-so-subtle dig at this cycle’s back-to-the-future frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, and a clear reminder that Rubio isn’t like them. Not just because, at 43, he is currently the youngest candidate in the race, but also because he belongs to 21st-century America’s fastest-growing and most-influential minority group.

“I live in an exceptional country where even the son of a bartender and a maid can have the same dreams and the same future as those who come from power and privilege,” Rubio said to applause from the 1,000 supporters in attendance.

Ever since Rubio first rocketed to national prominence during his tea party-fueled trouncing of former Gov. Charlie Crist in the 2010 Florida Senate race, the media has touted him as “The Man Who Could Be the First Latino President” — and the buzz will only get louder now that Rubio has officially entered the race.

But what Rubio’s launch party revealed is that labeling the senator “Latino” doesn’t actually tell you a whole lot about him. If you really want to understand his politics — and the presidential campaign he is about to embark upon — you need to see him through a different lens.

Marco Rubio sits with his son, Anthony Rubio, and father, Mario Rubio, in 2010. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)

You need to see Rubio as part of a specific subset of Latinos: Cuban-Americans.

“Rubio’s Cuban background is obviously a huge part of who he is,” says George Gonzalez, a politics professor at the University of Miami. “And it’s not the same as being Mexican-American or Puerto-Rican-American.”

It would be reductive — offensive, even — to suggest that any politician could be explained solely by his ethnic heritage. But to an unusual degree, Rubio’s views on both foreign and domestic policy — hawkish in the former instance and gentler in the latter — have been defined by his family’s roots in Cuba and his experiences coming of age in Miami’s exile community.

As a boy, Rubio would listen to his maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, talk of leaving Cuba in 1956, a few years before the revolution. “He had detested communism even before Castro came to power,” Rubio later wrote in his memoir, An American Son. “He accused John F. Kennedy of betraying the Cuban exiles who had fought at the Bay of Pigs, but loved Bobby Kennedy for plotting to kill Castro.” Young Rubio boasted that one day he would overthrow the Cuba dictator and become president of a free Cuba, and when Garcia fell for Ronald Reagan, so did his grandson. “America must be a strong country, he constantly preached, or the world would succumb to darkness” — that’s how Rubio described his grandfather’s views in his book. “[Jimmy Carter] was weak, he said, and other countries preyed on his weakness.”

Even today, Rubio is still under Garcia’s sway when it comes to Cuba. “He was my mentor and my closest boyhood friend,” the senator recalled in An American Son. For the past few months, Rubio has been the most vocal critic of Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with the communist state, calling such diplomacy “ridiculous” and vowing that Congress will torpedo it despite the fact that these views place him at odds with the vast majority of Cuban-Americans his age and younger as well as the American electorate more broadly. Rubio’s Cold War mindset may clash with the 21st-century image he’s trying to project, but he seems unperturbed. “I don’t care if the polls say that 99 percent of people believe we should normalize relations in Cuba,” Rubio explained in December. “I don’t care if 99 percent of people in polls disagree with my position. This is my position, and I feel passionately about it.”

On Monday, in a room packed with Cuban-born Miamians, Rubio denounced what he called the Obama administration’s “near total disregard for the erosion of democracy and human rights around the world” — then departed from his prepared remarks to add a pointed coda: “Especially in Cuba.” The ad-lib earned Rubio his loudest cheers of the evening.

“What Obama is doing with Cuba now? It’s no good,” said émigré Eduardo Migueltorena, 62, after Rubio’s speech. “The Castros, they are liars.”

Papá Garcia’s influence over the rest of Rubio’s foreign policy is less obvious but just as strong. “[My grandfather] thought the world didn’t respect or fear Carter,” Rubio wrote in his memoir. “That’s why the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and the Iranians had seized our embassy. He blamed the failed attempt to rescue the hostages on cuts to defense spending Carter had made. Ronald Reagan would restore our strength, he assured me.”

Marco Rubio announces his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

As a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, Rubio has spent much of the last year burnishing his foreign policy credentials, and his strategists now see this as a competitive advantage in a GOP primary field heavy on governors (Bush, Scott Walker) and light on overseas experience. And so in Monday’s speech Rubio framed Obama as the second coming of Carter and positioned himself, like Reagan, as the more muscular alternative — a hawk who is open to military action against Iran, who opposes a nuclear pact with Tehran, who wants to keep Guantanamo open, and who voted to arm the Syrian rebels in their battle against Bashar al-Assad.

“If America accepts the mantle of global leadership by abandoning this administration’s dangerous concessions to Iran, and its hostility to Israel; by reversing the hollowing out of our military; by giving our men and women in uniform the resources, care and gratitude they deserve; by no longer being passive in the face of Chinese and Russian aggression,” Rubio said, “then our nation will be safer, the world more stable, and our people more prosperous.”

Rubio’s background — his inherited aversion to dictators — should help convince GOP primary voters that his tough talk is for real, says George Gonzalez, the University of Miami professor. “When Rubio argues a hawkish stance, he will be telling voters that they can take that as a reliable position because he’s Cuban-American,” Gonzalez explains. “They can have confidence that it is his actual position — ‘We’re not going to elect a hawk but get a dove with you.’”

The opposite may be true, however, on the domestic front — especially when it comes to immigration. Famously, Rubio was one of eight bipartisan negotiators on a sweeping immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in 2013 but later died in the House. Since then, Rubio has backed away from his own proposal, reciting the usual Republican talking points about securing the border first. But friends and foes alike suspect that his heart isn’t really in it.

After the speech, Carlos Avila, a 31-year-old lawyer from New Jersey, stood outside the Freedom Tower waiting for Rubio to exit. In 2008, Avila and his wife had voted for Obama, but now they were dissatisfied with the lack of economic progress “for people like us” and leaning Republican. Asked what he liked about Rubio, Avila, whose parents brought him to America from Ecuador when he was 4 years old, immediately mentioned immigration. “Rubio is not a perfect candidate,” Avila said. “But his immigration stance, I think it’s a political calculation. Obama was the same on gay marriage. I think if Rubio were to get into the White House, he would be supportive of immigration reform.”

Tea party types tend to agree, which is why they seem to have forsaken Rubio. The truth is, Rubio empathizes with the immigrant experience because he knows that experience firsthand — and he can’t hide his empathy when he speaks. In Monday’s announcement address, Rubio reminded listeners that “both of my parents were born to poor families in Cuba” and went on to name “the single mother who works long hours for little pay so her children don’t have to struggle the way she has”; “the student who takes two buses before dawn to attend a better school halfway across town; “the workers in our hotel kitchens, the landscaping crews in our neighborhoods, the late-night janitorial staff that clean our offices.” Like his immigration bill, Rubio’s tax and education plans stand out because they would do more to help these people than the typical GOP proposals.

Marco Rubio autographs a magazine with his picture on the cover in April 2015. (Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

As a member of the West Miami City Commission — his first elected office — Rubio realized that “government at its best can make a positive difference in our lives when it listens to the people,” as he wrote in An American Son. The example he gave? Ensuring that the commission planted a handful of roadside trees in a neighborhood that had none. “I had grown up in a Cuban-American home,” Rubio concluded, “but I don’t think I had understood the community and my place in it until this experience. I don’t think I really knew where I was from and who I was until I spent hundreds of hours in the company of the people who claimed me as one of their own.”

Monday’s campaign kickoff clearly reflected Rubio’s Cuban-American identity — and a Rubio presidency likely would as well. The contrast with Rubio’s fellow 2016 combatant Ted Cruz is striking. Cruz is also the son of a Cuban émigré. But his formative influences were the church (his father is a Southern Baptist minister), the Ivy League (he was a star student at Princeton and Harvard), and movement conservatism (he attended free-market summer camp as a kid and now takes his cues from the tea party). That’s why he announced his campaign last month at a conservative evangelical university, far from his home state of Texas.

Rubio is different. According to campaign spokesman Alex Conant, it was Rubio himself who insisted on launching his White House bid at the Freedom Tower, which in the early 1960s became known as “El Refugio” — the Ellis Island of the Cuban exodus. To the left of Rubio’s podium Monday was a “cultural legacy gallery” filled with images of the Cuban diaspora; in the back of the gilded, columned hall stood a glass case displaying the doll, locket, and communion beads carried to Miami by a young Cuban girl in 1962. “The Freedom Tower is the single most important manifestation of this period of Cold War-era politics,” read a sign on the wall. “To this day, it remains an iconic symbol for Miami’s exile community.”

None of this was accidental. “It was the symbolism of it,” Conant told Yahoo News when asked why Rubio chose the Freedom Tower. “This is the room where tens of thousands of Cuban refugees came into America. Biography is important.”