Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Romney/ Ryan on Cuba

Cuba is hardly the only issue determining Presidential preferences.   Some who favor Romney are convinced he would address Cuba in a more sensible and centrist way than reflected below.  However, for those who support Obama, a donation page has been created here that enables them to do so while signaling interest in this topic to his political advisers.



GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY ON CUBA AND LATIN AMERICA

MITT ROMNEY PRESS | 25 JANUARY, 2012 - 17:40

Location

Boston, MA
United States
Mitt Romney will adopt a clear policy toward the Cuban regime: no accommodation, no appeasement. The United States should not relent until the day when the Castros’ regime meets its end and their history is written among the world's most reviled despots, tyrants, and frauds. The North Star that guides Mitt Romney’s policy toward the island is the realizable dream of a free Cuba.
Unfortunately, President Obama has adopted a strategy of appeasement toward the Castro regime. He unilaterally relaxed sanctions without making any demands of the regime. Predictably, the Castros responded to these naïve concessions by tightening their grip on the island and by taking an American, Alan Gross, as a political prisoner.  Now, increased travel and remittances to Cuba prop up a regime desperate for foreign currency.
Mitt Romney will break sharply with President Obama’s appeasement strategy. Mitt Romney believes unilateral concessions to a dictatorial regime are counterproductive, helping to secure a succession of power and greater repression instead of a transition to freedom. Mitt Romney will send a strong message to both the regime and the Cuban people that the United States stands with the courageous pro-democracy movement on the island, and that our support will never waver. Mitt Romney’s policy toward Cuba will include:
Reinstating Travel & Remittance Restrictions. Mitt Romney will reinstate the 2004 travel and remittance restrictions that President Obama naively lifted.
Adhering to the Helms-Burton Act. Mitt Romney will strictly adhere to the Helms-Burton Act, including Title III, to place maximum pressure on the Cuban regime.
Demanding Release of Alan Gross. Mitt Romney will demand the immediate release of Alan Gross.
Democracy Promotion Programs. Mitt Romney will fully fund and effectively implement democracy promotion programs to support Cuba’s brave pro-democracy movement.
Breaking the Information Blockade. Mitt Romney will commit to breaking the information blockade the Castro regime places on the Cuban people. He will order effective use of Radio and TV Marti’s broadcasts to the island and employ robust Internet, social media, and other innovative steps to bring information to the Cuban people and help them send information out.
Publicly Naming Oppressors. Mitt Romney will publicly identify by name those police officers, prison officials, judges, state security personnel, and regime officials who mistreat, torture, and oppress the Cuban people so they know they will be held individually accountable.
Holding the Castros Accountable for the Brothers to the Rescue Shoot Down.  Mitt Romney will explore all avenues — including criminal indictment — to ensure that Fidel and Raul Castro are held accountable for the killing of four Americans in the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue airplanes.
Mitt Romney recognizes the wider threat to freedom posed by the anti-American Bolivarian movement across Latin America that is led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers. This movement threatens the principles enshrined in the Inter-American Democratic Charter and poses a serious national security threat to U.S. regional allies and the U.S. homeland in the form of an enhanced drug-terror nexus. Mitt Romney will pursue a resolute policy toward Latin America that will include:
Bolstering the Inter-American Democratic Charter. The precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter will form the cornerstone of U.S. policy in the hemisphere. There will never be a Cuban exception to the Charter.
Campaign for Economic Opportunity in Latin America. In his first 100 days, Mitt Romney will launch a vigorous public diplomacy and trade promotion effort in the region — the Campaign for Economic Opportunity in Latin America (CEOLA) — to extol the virtues of democracy and free trade and contrast them with the ills of the model offered by Cuba and Venezuela.
Hemispheric Joint Task Force on Crime & Terrorism. Mitt Romney will form a unified Hemispheric Joint Task Force on Crime and Terrorism to coordinate intelligence and law enforcement among our allies against regional terrorist groups and criminal networks.
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"This is a critical time. I think you realize that. We've waited a long, long time for the opportunity that is represented by a new president, and by new leadership, or by old leadership finally kicking the bucket in Cuba… And I want to take advantage… I want to be the American president that is proud to be able to say that I was president at the time that we brought freedom back to the people of Cuba.

If I'm fortunate to become the next president of the United States it is my expectation that Fidel Castro will finally be taken off this planet… I doubt he'll take any time in the sky. He'll find a nether region to be more to his comfort…

I know I learned something about negotiating. I found that if I was trying to negotiate with someone else that before I gave them something, I wanted to know what I was going to get back. The idea that I’m going to negotiate, it’s a trade – I’m going to get something, and they’re going to get something.

What has occurred to me as I’ve watched our president over the last Castro years, is that from time to time we have a president who thinks that a tyrant, that a person who considers America their enemy, that that tyrant will give them something, just by virtue of us giving them something, with no trade whatsoever. Where we just say here, we’ll give you this thing and hope you’ll give us something nice back. Negotiations are not a matter of giving and hope. They’re a matter of giving and getting in return.

This president has decided to give a gift, to Castro, to allow remittances to come from the United States to go into Cuba and help the economy of Cuba. He’s allowed more traveling into Cuba. Showing that olive branch if you will. And how has it been met? It is met with a man, Wilman Villar*, who must sacrifice his own life through his hunger strike, with many, many people being oppressed in prison.

This president does not understand that by helping Castro, he is not helping the people of Cuba he is hurting them, he is not putting forward a policy of freedom, he is accommodating and encouraging a policy of oppression, and if I’m President of the United States, we will return to Helms-Burton and the law, and we will not give Castro any gifts.

*Wilman Villar is a political prisoner who died in January 2012 after a 50-day hunger strike

Jan 25, 2012: Romney speaking at the US-Cuba Democracy PAC event in Miami Freedom Tower


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Romney's GOP drops Cuba, gays in the military from platform

By Paul West

August 20, 2012, 3:34 p.m.

TAMPA, Fla. -- At the direction of Mitt Romney's campaign, the Republican Party is moving to soften its official policy on some of the most cherished ideas of the party's conservative wing, including restrictions on trade and travel to Cuba and prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military.

Four years ago, the GOP unequivocally proclaimed "the incompatibility of homosexuality with military service" in a platform plank that affirmed the need to "protect our servicemen and women" and "the benefits of traditional military culture."

Draft language in the 2012 edition, crafted under the tight control of the Romney campaign, drops any reference to gays in the military, however. It also doesn't directly address President Obama's decision to abandon the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and let gays and lesbians serve openly.

In its place, the Romney Republicans are offering a vague reference to study Obama's military personnel policies.

"We reject the use of the military as a platform for social experimentation," states the 2012 platform. "We will conduct an objective review of the current administration's management of military personnel and will correct any problems with appropriate administrative of legal action."

Even more striking, perhaps, the 2012 platform as drafted contains no mention in its foreign policy section of Cuba, a topic of intense interest to pro-Republican Cuban American voters in South Florida and an entrenched piece of Republican dogma for a half-century.

The 2008 platform demanded continued "restrictions on trade with, and travel to, Cuba as a measure of solidarity with the political prisoners and all the oppressed Cuban people." But Obama has lifted many of the travel restrictions to Cuba, to encourage more personal exchanges with residents of the Communist island. Regular flights are now taking off for Cuba, including from the airport in Tampa, site of next week's nominating convention for Romney.

At the height of Florida's pivotal primary last winter, when a surging Newt Gingrich was threatening to knock him from the lead, Romney was outspoken on the subject of Cuba. He told a Miami audience that Obama "does not understand that by helping Castro, he is not helping the people of Cuba. He is hurting them."

But during an appearance this month before a predominantly Latino crowd in the Miami area, Romney never even brought up Cuba, an omission that drew critical comments from local Republicans, including Ana Navarro, a prominent Cuban American campaign strategist who was active in John McCain's 2008 campaign.

The 112 GOP convention delegates on the platform committee will be able to offer amendments over the next two days, as they work to complete a draft of the document. It will be sent to the full Republican nominating convention next week for approval.


Lost in translation: GOP platform DOES include Cuba travel restrictions

Memo to those assembling the GOP platform for the upcoming Republican National Convention: Don't say restrictions on Cuba trade aren't a plank when it is.
A GOP platform that mentions support for the Cuban embargo isn't news. It's like Republicans affirming their support for tax cuts. A GOP platform without Cuba? That's news. Very big news.
So when the Los Angeles Times today attended an RNC platform meeting and two Republican officials mentioned that Cuba wasn't part of the platform, it obviously was news. Very big news. After all, Republican vice-presidential pick Paul Ryan had an anti-embargo voting record until about 2007, Republican Cuba experts say. After that, they say, Ryan became more pro-embargo (more here).
Mitt Romney's campaign quickly responded to the story by noting that the platform does include language that supports restrictions on Cuba. And they blame the story on supporters of Congressman Ron Paul, a free-trader.
"Alternatively, we will stand with the true democracies of the region against both Marxist subversion and the drug lords, helping them to become prosperous alternatives to the collapsing model of Venezuela and Cuba.
"We affirm our friendship with the People of Cuba and look toward their reunion with the rest of our hemispheric family. The anachronistic regime in Havana which rules them is a mummified relic of the age of totalitarianism, a state-sponsor of terrorism. We reject any dynastic succession of power within the Castro family and affirm the principles codified in U.S. law as conditions for the lifting of trade, travel, and financial sanctions: the legalization of political parties, an independent media, and free and fair internationally-supervised elections. We renew our commitment to Cuba’s courageous pro-democracy movement as the protagonists of Cuba’s inevitable liberation and democratic future. We call for a dedicated platform for the transmission of Radio and TV Marti and for the promotion of Internet access and circumvention technology as tools to strengthen the pro-democracy movement. We support the work of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba and affirm the principles of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, recognizing the rights of Cubans fleeing Communism."
That's pretty standard, boilerplate stuff.
However there is one possible omission: The platform doesn't explicitly call for reversing the executive decision of President Obama that allowed for more travel to Cuba.
Romney's camp, including Cuba-crackdown leader and former Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, says no additional language is needed, in great part because Romney's campaign notes that he explicitly opposes Obama's executive decision to loosen travel and remittances to Cuba.

Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2012/08/lost-in-translation-gop-platform-does-include-cuba-travel-restrictions.html#storylink=cpy



Republican platform doesn't abandon Cuba after all

By Paul West
August 20, 2012, 6:06 p.m.
TAMPA, Fla. -- Cuban Americans can relax. The 2012 Republican platform will continue the party’s hard-line rhetoric toward the Communist regime in Cuba, though it does not call for reversing President Obama’s decision to relax restrictions on travel and financial assistance to residents of the island.
An earlier Politics Now post stated incorrectly that the GOP platform was silent on Cuba. A delegate on the party platform’s foreign policy and defense subcommittee, who had a copy of the pertinent language, expressed surprise during a drafting session on the plank Monday that Cuba wasn’t mentioned. A GOP aide with access to the platform confirmed that the foreign policy portion section did not mention Cuba.
The actual text of this year’s GOP platform draft is a closely held document, crafted under the control of the Mitt Romney campaign.
The draft planks were distributed to the platform delegates -- on paper only, not digitally -- making it much more difficult for copies to circulate surreptitiously to reporters or to interest groups that might want to criticize.
But after the Politics Now post stirred up a swarm of concern, particularly in south Florida, the campaign agreed to provide the platform language about Cuba, some of it directly lifted from the 2008 document.
Four years ago, the platform stated that the Republicans “support restrictions on trade with, and travel to, Cuba.”  The 2012 version also contains language that points in that direction.
But there is no specific call to tighten the president’s loosening of restrictions, which made it easier for Cuban Americans to visit relatives on the island and send them money, and has been popular with some Latino voters.
Here is the language on Cuba, as released Monday night by the Romney campaign:
"Alternatively, we will stand with the true democracies of the region against both Marxist subversion and the drug lords, helping them to become prosperous alternatives to the collapsing model of Venezuela and Cuba.
"We affirm our friendship with the people of Cuba and look toward their reunion with the rest of our hemispheric family. The anachronistic regime in Havana which rules them is a mummified relic of the age of totalitarianism, a state-sponsor of terrorism. We reject any dynastic succession of power within the Castro family and affirm the principles codified in U.S. law as conditions for the lifting of trade, travel, and financial sanctions: the legalization of political parties, an independent media, and free and fair internationally-supervised elections. We renew our commitment to Cuba’s courageous pro-democracy movement as the protagonists of Cuba’s inevitable liberation and democratic future. We call for a dedicated platform for the transmission of Radio and TV Marti and for the promotion of Internet access and circumvention technology as tools to strengthen the pro-democracy movement. We support the work of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba and affirm the principles of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, recognizing the rights of Cubans fleeing Communism."



Republican Platform text

Strengthening Ties in the Americas



We will resist foreign influence in our hemisphere. We thereby seek not only to provide for our own security, but also to create a climate for democracy and self-determination throughout the Americas.
The current Administration has turned its back on Latin America, with predictable results. Rather than supporting our democratic allies in the region, the President has prioritized engagement with our enemies in the region. Venezuela represents an increasing threat to U.S. security, a threat which has grown much worse on the current President’s watch. In the last three years, Venezuela has become a narco-terrorist state, turning it into an Iranian outpost in the Western hemisphere. The current regime issues Venezuelan passports or visas to thousands of Middle Eastern terrorists offering safe haven to Hezbollah trainers, operatives, recruiters and fundraisers.
Alternatively, we will stand with the true democracies of the region against both Marxist subversion and the drug lords, helping them to become prosperous alternatives to the collapsing model of Venezuela and Cuba.
We affirm our friendship with the People of Cuba and look toward their reunion with the rest of our hemispheric family. The anachronistic regime in Havana which rules them is a mummified relic of the age of totalitarianism, a state-sponsor of terrorism. We reject any dynastic succession of power within the Castro family and affirm the principles codified in U.S. law as conditions for the lifting of trade, travel, and financial sanctions: the legalization of political parties, an independent media, and free and fair internationally-supervised elections. We renew our commitment to Cuba’s courageous pro-democracy movement as the protagonists of Cuba’s inevitable liberation and democratic future. We call for a dedicated platform for the transmission of Radio and TV Marti and for the promotion of Internet access and circumvention technology as tools to strengthen the pro-democracy movement. We support the work of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba and affirm the principles of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, recognizing the rights of Cubans fleeing Communism.
The war on drugs and the war on terror have become a single enterprise. We salute our allies in this fight, especially the people of Mexico and Colombia. We propose a unified effort on crime and terrorism to coordinate intelligence and enforcement among our regional allies, as well as military-to-military training and intelligence sharing with Mexico, whose people are bearing the brunt of the drug cartels’ savage assault.
Our Canadian neighbors can count on our close cooperation and respect. As soon as possible, we will reverse the current Administration’s blocking of the Keystone XL Pipeline so that both our countries can profit from this vital venture and there will no need for hemispheric oil to be shipped to China.

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Ryan Criticizes Obama’s Cuba Policy and Explains His Shift on the Issue
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: September 22, 2012


MIAMI — On a morning intended to reassure hard-line anti-Castro voters, who are a powerful force in South Florida Republican politics, Representative Paul D. Ryan made a pilgrimage to a restaurant here at the heart of the Cuban exile community in Little Havana. Part of the reason: to criticize what he called President Obama’s “appeasement” of the Cuban government.

But the visit was also intended to do some fence-mending of his own: as a young congressman from a largely rural Wisconsin district, Mr. Ryan, now Mitt Romney’s 42-year-old vice-presidential running mate, supported ending the trade embargo with Cuba, an unpopular sentiment among many Republicans and Cuban exiles in this part of Florida, one of the most crucial swing states in the general election.

“If we think engagement works well with China, well, it ought to work well with Cuba,” Mr. Ryan had said a decade ago in an interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The embargo doesn’t work. It is a failed policy,” he said, adding that while many Cuban-Americans were passionate in their support of the embargo, “I just don’t agree with them and never have.”

And so on Saturday morning, Mr. Ryan appeared alongside a powerhouse lineup of Florida Republicans including former Gov. Jeb Bush at the restaurant Versailles, long famous as a gathering place for the anti-Castro movement.

There, in front of a cheering crowd and with particularly intense endorsement from former Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Mr. Ryan made the case that his understanding of Cuba had evolved under long tutelage from Republican House members from South Florida, including Mr. Diaz-Balart and his younger brother Mario, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, now the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman, who have also endorsed him.

In a separate local television interview, Mr. Ryan also explained how he had come to change his mind and since 2007 has supported the embargo.

“You learn from friendships,” Mr. Ryan told the crowd at Versailles, explaining that his Florida friends in Congress had shown him “just how brutal the Castro regime is, just how this president’s policy of appeasement is not working.”

Mr. Ryan argues that the Obama administration has been too willing to engage with Cuba and has made it too easy to travel back and forth and send money to Havana from the United States. He vowed that a Romney-Ryan administration would be “tough on Castro” as well as on Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader.

An aide said Mr. Ryan’s evolution was not hard to understand: when he began in Congress he considered the issue primarily through the prism of constituents in southern Wisconsin who worried about export markets for agricultural products. But gradually, the aide said, Mr. Ryan’s views evolved to consider more heavily the embargo’s national security implications, and that he has explicitly supported the embargo for the past five years.

An Obama campaign official took strong issue with Mr. Ryan’s characterization of the administration’s Cuba policy, saying that Mr. Obama “has repeatedly renewed the trade embargo with Cuba, pressured the Castro regime to give its people more of a say in their own future, and supported democracy movements on the island.”

The official also said that the administration had “put in place common-sense, family-based reforms that allow Cuban-Americans to visit their family members still living in Cuba.”

Later in the day, Mr. Ryan spoke to 2,000 supporters at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, drawing ovations and what seemed universal approval from the cheering crowd. It was a stark contrast to his appearance the day before at the AARP convention in New Orleans, where he was booed for making many of the same arguments about Medicare and the Obama administration.

As he had in Miami, Mr. Ryan also began with a particularly local appeal to voters, arguing that the Romney-Ryan ticket would be better than the Obama administration for space exploration, long an economic driver in central and eastern Florida. (The Obama campaign quickly issued a statement asserting that Mr. Ryan repeatedly voted against NASA funding and that Romney-Ryan budget cuts could trim space-exploration financing by 19 percent.)

Using PowerPoint slides projected onto the wall of the arena, and with a national debt clock ticking behind him, Mr. Ryan put on a tutorial embraced by the crowd about the dangers of the national debt and government spending. “We can’t afford four more years of the last four years,” he said.

And he ended with what has become an effective talking point for his campaign, seizing on recent comments by Mr. Obama about how hard it is to change Washington from the inside.

“Don’t we send presidents to Washington to change Washington, to fix the mess in Washington?” Mr. Ryan asked. “When President Obama admits that he cannot change Washington, then we need to change presidents.”

While Mr. Ryan was on the stump in Florida on Saturday, the top of the Republican ticket was in California raising money in the hopes of recovering his fund-raising advantage.

In August, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party raised more than Mr. Romney and the Republican Party. And much of the more than $300 million the campaign reported raising this summer is earmarked for the Republican National Committee, state Republican organizations and Congressional races, limiting the money Mr. Romney’s own campaign has to spend.

Mr. Obama on Saturday headed to Mr. Ryan’s home state, Wisconsin, to try to shore up support there. The addition of Mr. Ryan to the Republican ticket made Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes quite competitive in the closing phase of the presidential race, but a recent Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll of likely Wisconsin voters found Mr. Obama with a slight edge in the state.

Meanwhile, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was campaigning Saturday in the swing state of New Hampshire, where he repeatedly brought sarcasm to bear on Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan, describing their record and agenda with a “can you believe that” tone.

Mr. Biden seized on Mr. Romney’s disparagement at a private fund-raiser of “47 percent” of Americans who see themselves as dependent on government benefits. Mr. Biden facetiously recommended a book by Mr. Ryan and two fellow Republican leaders in the House, “Young Guns.”

“Get it, read it, it’s in paperback,” Mr. Biden said. “They constantly talk about this culture of dependence.”

He said he did not recognize the country described in the book. “People who get knocked down, my experience has been we get back up,” he told several hundred enthusiastic supporters at a middle school in the town of Merrimack. “There is no quit in America.”


Trip Gabriel contributed reporting from Merrimack, N.H.


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Republican Candidates Court Miami’s Cuban Vote


BY JASON MARGOLIS ⋅ JANUARY 27, 2012 ⋅ 

There’s a political truism in Miami: Cuban Americans always vote Republican.
But four years ago, that voting bloc started to fray. Candidate Obama captured about a third of the Cuban vote in Miami.
Now the right-wing Miami Cuban establishment has a warning for their community: President Obama is soft on the Castro brothers.
Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen spoke in Miami this week at a Mitt Romney campaign event. Switching between Spanish and English, Ros-Lehtinen said every time President Obama mentions Cuba it’s to explain why he’s giving further economic concessions to the Castro regime.
Ros-Lehtinen is referring to the Obama administration’s easing of travel restrictions and remittances to Cuba. Critics call the policies an economic boon for the Castros.
“So what you have now is an emboldened regime that feels that they can do whatever they want because they’re not facing any consequences,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC.

“There has to be consequences to certain bad actions: taking an American hostage, huge waves of repression. If they think they can do it, and they’re going to get this inflow of hard currency, then they’re going to increase the repression and continue doing so.”
The Republican presidential candidates are seizing on this. Mitt Romney spoke in downtown Miami this week.
“Negotiations are not a matter of giving and hope, they’re a matter of giving and getting in return. This president has done something which is characteristic of his presidency and that is he turns and gives. And says that everybody in the world has the same interest and so people will give back to us. He’s wrong.”
But polls suggest a majority of Cuban Americans actually favor the Obama administration policies toward Cuba.
Uva de Aragón likes the policies and visits the island. She was born in Cuba and left as a young girl. De Aragón recently retired as the associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
“I think the more open Cuba is, the more people who travel to Cuba, the more money you send to Cubans: the more you empower them, the more they’re knowledgeable. The people who travel and who bring magazines or stories, or whatever are an important source of information. So I’m very favorable to anything that opens up the island.”
De Aragón sees a contradiction between what many Cuban-Americans say and what they do. For instance, she said when you ask them about remittances, they respond this way: “Yes, of course I’m in favor of the embargo.”
But De Aragón said when you ask the same people if they send their family money back in Cuba, they’ll say, “Of course, he’s my brother!”
Cuban American Joe Garcia doesn’t mince words about the hardliners on Cuban policy and the Republican candidates courting them.
“What you have going on here is a clown show and the audience is filled with clowns.”
Garcia ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008 and 2010 as a Democrat. He says the president’s Cuba policies have been very effective assisting dissidents and expanding civil society. He said the hard-line hasn’t worked. Garcia called the rightwing position toward Cuba a religion, not a rational policy.
“Part of the problem is that we’re engaged in revenge politics, which of course feels very nice, right? There’s a warmth and a heat that is driven by the absolute loathing of the Castro regime, which I share in. But later in the week someone will call for the 82nd Airborne to invade Cuba and I’m sure Gingrich will up the ante by calling for a nuking of the Havana suburbs just to teach Fidel a lesson.”
That hasn’t happened. But Newt Gingrich did call this week for American support for a “Cuban Spring.”

Some in the under-30 crowd here say all the bad blood and bickering over travel restrictions and remittances is a distraction.
I met David Cardenas and Giancarlo Sopo for dinner in downtown Miami. Cardenas is active in the Republican party; Sopo is with the Democrats. They have small disagreements about travel restrictions, but they say it’s not worth arguing about.
“I think on the big issues relating to Cuba, in the final analysis, Cubans overwhelming agree with one and other,” said Sopo.
“I completely agree with that,” said Cardena. “I think Cubans are united as a community, united in their policy positions toward Cuba.”
The trade embargo has overwhelming bipartisan support here. And in Congress and the White House.
Cardenas and Sopo are able to break bread together, perhaps because Cuba is not the focus of their lives.
“I would say that Cuban Americans of our generation are not single-issue voters, much in the same way our grandparents and some of our parents are,” said Cardenas.
“I would agree with what David is saying,” said Cardenas. “Cuba was much closer to their lives. They had just left the country, many of them still had hopes of going back. I think David and I, we see Miami as our home.”
And that’s where their real disagreement begins: What domestic economic policies are best for their home?
My comment  
A tonal correction to your assessment of public opinion:
Support for the trade embargo is 56% to 44% among Cuban Americans, according to the annual poll by Florida International University, hardly "overwhelming".   Cuban Americans, however, flip in their support for ending all travel restrictions, 57% to 43%.   
A 2009 Gallup Poll showed a majority of Americans favor ending the embargo, 51% to 36%.  The end of all travel restrictions was supported by 64%, with only 27% wanting to maintain them.  
The White House and Congress are out of step.
Even among Republicans, Ron Paul's message of normalization with Cuba could find surprising support.  
Gallup showed 60% of Americans in favor, only 30% opposed.  FIU shows  Cuban Americans were 58% for, 40% against
John McAuliff
Fund for Reconciliation and Development


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