One evening in late September, the YouTube celebrity Alex Otaola and three of his producers huddled in their Miami studio to concoct an episode of his online show, “Hola! Ota-Ola.” At forty-one, Otaola has become a popular and bitterly divisive figure among young Cubans in South Florida. Before going live, the host, who wore a turban and a black Mickey Mouse shirt, sat on the set scrolling through his phone in silence. To his right, a “Latinos for Trump” sign rested on a chair; next to it stood a cutout of the President with his thumbs up. Inside the recording booth, Otaola’s producers rushed to gather enough content to liven up his nearly three-hour-long performance. Sipping coffee from thimble-sized cups, they scoured social media in search of images, videos, and audio clips to accompany the host’s galloping script. A clipboard listed all the points Otaola was meant to hit that day: “Protests,” “Elections/Dumped ballots,” and “Pompeo/AIS”—a reference to the State Department’s newly announced sanctions against Cuba. Suddenly, Otaola walked into the booth with a bundle of flannel blankets in his arms. Inside them was a live squirrel monkey. “Her name is Karma,” the host announced, with a proud smile.
Minutes later, Otaola was addressing twenty-seven thousand fans, from a red leather armchair on his set. “Hola, Hola!” he shouted, thrusting his arms into the air. After offering a generous dose of Cuban gossip, he dove into domestic politics. “Gentlemen, they tried to poison Trump!” he exclaimed, feigning shock at the ricin-laced letter sent to the White House. Otaola then turned to a Times exposé on the President’s tax avoidance and burgeoning debt: “Trump has denied it. He’s said it’s a lie, therefore it is fake news,” he told his audience. There was no reason to fret—someone from the Florida Republican Party had recently called Otaola to say that a record number of young people were registering to vote. As a “Latinos for Trump” image appeared onscreen, the host questioned the safety of voting by mail. “Get in line to take part in the world’s greatest democracy,” he proclaimed, his rhythm building. “Register! Vote! Participate!” The nineties hit song “I Like to Move It,” mixed with the lyrics “Es hora de que votes,” or “It’s time to vote,” started blasting through the studio’s walls. Karma, the monkey, shrieked loudly.
Nearly two decades ago, Otaola, then a young state-media worker in Havana, won an American visa in a lottery for Cuban citizens, and moved to Miami in search of work. He belongs to what pundits refer to as the “post-1995 generation.” For many Cuban émigrés, the year one fled the island is telling enough to serve as a rough demarcation between generations. Among Miami’s Cuban old guard, those who started arriving in the nineties are seen as Comunistas arrepentidos, or repentant Communists. The pioneers of the post-1995 generation fled amid revolt in the mid-nineties, when more than thirty-five thousand people left the island in homemade rafts and rickety boats, spurring la crisis de los balseros, or the rafters’ crisis. Others arrived after the creation of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which Bill Clinton enacted to deter further arrivals by sea and which ended a three-decade practice of automatically allowing Cuban immigrants who arrived by boat into the country. Democrats saw the post-1995 generation as an opportunity to make inroads with the Cuban-American electorate in South Florida, which has been dominated by hard-line conservatives who fled the island in the late nineteen-fifties, after Fidel Castro’s revolution.
For years, the majority of post-1995 émigrés favored loosening restrictions on Cuba and moving away from the United States’ embargo against the island. According to Florida International University’s Cuba Poll, recent émigrés were the most likely to support Barack Obama in 2012 and the least likely to support Donald Trump in 2016. But newer polling numbers tell a dramatically different story. In less than four years, members of the post-1995 generation, who supported both parties almost equally in 2016, became more than forty points likelier to identify as Republican, according to the polling group Equis Labs. What’s behind this swing is unclear, but many experts have drawn their own conclusions. Some point to a profound disillusionment with the results of Obama’s policy of rapprochement; others signal a special reverence for Trump, an aversion to “Democratic Socialism,” and a political identity yet to be defined.
The shift is perplexing and alarming to Florida Democrats. They find it hard to understand why members of the post-1995 generation, who fled an authoritarian regime, would be lured in by an American leader who embraces strongman tactics. “What do they see? What do they hear?” Carmen Pelaez, a Cuban-American filmmaker and political consultant, said. “A language they recognize: el caudillismo”—rule by strongman. For more than a year, Carlos Odio, the co-founder of Equis Labs, has been studying the partisan shift among this generation. Odio said that, in focus groups, recent émigrés expressed strong support for Trump’s handling of the economy, and also a fear of socialism. “The Trump brand lives independently of a good economy,” he said. “It’s tied with the notion that he is a bulwark against socialist ideas, which are somehow aligned against their own entrepreneurship.”
Florida liberals point out that many recent émigrés have been out of work since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and rely heavily on signature social-welfare programs enacted by Democrats. Hialeah, a city north of Miami which is home to the largest Cuban diaspora in the country, has some of the nation’s highest numbers of Obamacare enrollees, yet is solidly Republican. At an early-voting location in the city, a Cuban-American couple wearing matching Trump hats said that their vote for the President was a vote against Communism. “We’re Cubans. We come from a dictatorship—we don’t want any of that here,” the man, who left the island in the early two-thousands, said. Odio pointed out that the narrative created by Trump backers such as Otaola, who shifted to the G.O.P. after the 2016 election, has helped change the post-1995 generation’s view of Democrats. “It has been filtered through this very one-sided media ecosystem, which is pulling together all of those loose strings and telling a cohesive narrative about why this generation of Cubans needs to move away from the Democrats,” he said.
After arriving in Miami, Otaola held different jobs, ranging from Walmart cashier to telenovela supporting actor. In 2017, he began airing his one-man show before a small audience. Within months, his audience soared. As a recent émigré himself, Otaola knows how to address a generation that is yearning to belong. He speaks in their preferred language, from a platform that is accessible to all. But he also spreads vast amounts of disinformation, telling his viewers that Obama and Anthony Fauci were seen together in a Wuhan lab, that Communism is inexorable under Biden, and that Antifa has infiltrated the Democratic Party. At that late-September taping of his show, Otaola made a big deal out of an “analysis” of Biden’s senility. He referred to it repeatedly and urged his producers to get out a copy of it. No one inside the recording booth seemed to know what he was referring to. Ultimately, they failed to produce the analysis, but the show went on regardless.
During this Presidential election in Florida, pro-Trump disinformation has become the norm. It’s being widely disseminated on the airwaves, spread on social-media platforms, and echoed at the highest levels, from the White House to the Republican National Convention. If there’s a notion that Trump has been sure to exploit in Florida, it’s that a Biden Presidency would bring anarchy to the country and lead it down a path to Communism. Speaking at a recent rally in Ocala, in central Florida, Trump accused Democrats of wanting to “ruin the lives” of Latinos living in the country. “They want to turn America into a Communist country or a socialist country,” Trump said. “We’re not letting it happen. We’re going to have a big victory, and that’ll be the end of it.”
Although polls show that Biden has a slight edge over Trump in Florida, the President leads overwhelmingly with Cuban-American voters. The latest F.I.U. Cuba Poll, which was released earlier this month, shows Trump trouncing Biden by thirty-four points. His support is strongest among older Cuban-Americans; younger members of the community and those who were born outside of Cuba tend to lean toward the Democratic Party. The pro-Trump shift observed in the post-1995 generation has rekindled a debate on whether the Cuban-American identity is inextricably linked to the Republican Party. “When people set foot in Miami,” Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist at F.I.U. who leads the Cuba Poll, said, “they see this success story brought about according to their creation myths—by embracing the Republican hard line.”
Such “creation myths” reach far back in time. They’re behind the notion that Cubans have always embraced Republicans and that only the G.O.P.’s tough stance on Cuba has been fruitful. Grenier pointed out that, in fact, many Cubans living in Florida in the seventies were Democrats. After Watergate, a significant number turned toward the Democratic Party, in reprisal for Richard Nixon’s perceived mistreatment of several Cuban exiles who participated in the break-in at the D emocratic National Committee headquarters. What’s more, the Democratic Party is behind numerous policies that have given Cuban immigrants unique privileges, including the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which puts Cuban immigrants on a path to citizenship just one year after their arrival to the U.S.
“What strikes me is just how short memory is,” Michael Bustamante, an F.I.U. scholar of Cuban-American history, told me. “The Obama policy was criticized from a month in about not having produced its results. But Lord knows embargo defenders shouldn’t talk about timelines, given how long they’ve waited for their policy to have results.” Although Trump has officially taken a hard line on Cuba, several of his associates have sought business opportunities on the island over the years, and the President even registered his company’s trademark there, in 2008. As with other issues, he has tried to overturn Obama’s legacy. Five months after taking office, Trump announced his plans to reverse his predecessor’s détente policy, and said, “With God’s help, a free Cuba is what we will soon achieve.” But the revolution will soon outlive twelve U.S. Administrations, including, most certainly, Trump’s own.
Asked why such misconceptions have endured, Grenier blamed Democrats in Florida and Washington. “The Democratic Party is not to be seen,” he said, referring to its scant presence in South Florida. In its absence, Republicans have seized the political narrative and built a large audience for themselves. Ric Herrero, the executive director of the Cuba Study Group, which advocates engagement with the island, explained that Republicans were present in the state year-round, actively organizing and advocating for their policy agenda. “Among Democrats, there is this lingering attitude that reaching out to the Cuban vote and trying to cultivate that vote is just not worth the trouble,” Herrero, who briefly led the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, said.
In the final weeks before the 2020 election, the Biden campaign has ramped up its investment in Florida and outspent Trump in Spanish-language television ads. But Democrats concede the limits of their strategy. “It’s been hard to break through the noise,” Felice Gorordo, an adviser to Biden, said, arguing that Republicans have had three years to roll out a disinformation campaign that preys on people’s fears. “Absent of us doing that, the other side has filled that vacuum.” Herrero echoed this concern: “You have a President and a Party that are only messaging voters on the Red Scare—the threat of a socialist takeover in the United States. That’s how they’re trying to win them over on policy. It’s all about triggering the identity of an exile.”
Although winning the Cuban vote is likely beyond Biden’s reach at this point, some see a limit to Trump’s approach. “A lot of people actually want to hear about jobs and health care,” Odio, the pollster, said. “Many are holding back because, frankly, they haven’t heard enough about Biden. And because they’re seeing so much negativity in their social media, in their families, and in their networks that there needs to be a permission structure where it’s O.K. to vote for Joe Biden.” In Herrero’s view, the shift among the post-1995 generation is conditional. “These migrants are a product of a post-totalitarian system—they know from growing up that the way to get ahead is to align yourself with power,” he said. “A takeaway of this radical shift is that it can also be undone.”
Outside of the Democratic Party, members of the post-1995 generation are also trying to figure out how to counter the right’s rhetoric. Among them is Guennady Rodriguez, a thirty-nine-year-old Cuban lawyer who settled in Miami a little less than a decade ago. In the past several years, Rodriguez has watched with angst as Otaola and others have spread falsehoods to lure voters away from Democrats. “They’ve manipulated people’s traumas,” he said. The vehemence of this year’s political debate has been on display during early voting in Florida. Many Cuban Trump supporters claim that the race is all but a moral choice between Communism and anti-Communism. The mere sight of a Biden supporter prompted bitter anger, and, in some cases, screaming. Conversations devolve because there is complete disagreement on basic facts. “In the absence of dialogue, democracy dies,” Rodriguez said.
Frustrated with a lack of moderate voices, Rodriguez started his own YouTube show, this summer, and founded 23yFlagler, a news site crafted for a Cuban-American audience. Stories on the site counter false narratives, but they also don’t present easy answers. “What Bothers Us Cubans About Black Lives Matter?” and “Guaranteeing Health Care Is a Capitalist Idea” are among the articles published recently on 23yFlagler. Rodriguez, who has hosted pro-Trump Cuban influencers on his show, hopes to foster conversations in which ideas are exchanged rather than preached. “We’ll see if it works out,” he said. “I don’t know if it will, but I need to trust in the power that the truth has to persuade.” Rodriguez recognizes that Otaola has become the primary source of information for many in his generation, and that the YouTube star’s influence has allowed him to discredit opposing voices.
On October 15th, before participating in an NBC News town hall, in Miami, Trump stopped by a fund-raising reception at his golf course in nearby Doral. There, the President met briefly with Otaola and took a couple questions from the host. The conversation, which was moderated by the Republican congressman Mario Díaz-Balart, mostly revolved around Trump exaggerating his role in countering Communism. “Biden and Obama gave everything away,” Trump said, of his predecessor’s policy on Cuba. “Now this regime is very, very poor.” As Trump spoke, Otaola recorded his words and nodded affirmingly.
The host also had a request of the President. “In our show, we’ve put together a red list of celebrities with ties to the Cuban dictatorship who enter the United States with a visa,” Otaola said. “Can we send it to you, so that you can vet these people and their visas?” Trump interrupted Díaz-Balart, who was translating, and quickly replied, “I would.” The President followed up with a question to Díaz-Balart: “So these are people you don’t want to have?” The congressman nodded. “I’ll take it,” Trump said to Otaola, referring to the list, and urged the host to reach out to him directly, just as the congressman had. “He has immediate access. You do, too.”
Rodriguez called the exchange brazen demagoguery. He said that the list included the names of musicians, professionals, and even dissidents, some of whom had spoken out against Otaola. They were, in essence, the host’s personal enemies. “It’s the return of a witch-hunt culture, where people are censored for the way they think,” Rodriguez said, adding that such lists were common in Cuba and had silenced opposing views. “It’s the kind of culture where prisoners of conscience abound.” By trying to retaliate against his enemies with the President’s help, Otaola was signalling that people would stay out of trouble as long as they sided with him and his views. In the eyes of Rodriguez, this was, at its core, an effort to intimidate Trump opponents ahead of the election, one that was reminiscent of McCarthyism and the Cuban regime that both he and Otaola had fled.
