Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite Needs a History Lesson on Cuba
A Florida Republican congresswoman made comments about Cuban-American cemetery plots that revealed just how little she understood about the community she represented.
In 2005, Florida Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite introduced legislation called the Remain in America Act. The bill would have provided federal funding - $75 million - to help Cuban Americans exhume the remains of relatives buried in the United States and repatriate them to Cuba. The stated rationale was that many Cuban exiles wished to be buried in their homeland but had been interred in the United States due to circumstances beyond their control.
The Cuban-American community’s response was not warm.
What She Missed
The Cuban exile community in South Florida is not a community in waiting. These are not people who left Cuba temporarily and are marking time until they can return. Many of them fled the Castro government because it imprisoned, tortured, or killed members of their families. Many of them lost property, businesses, and professional licenses when the revolution nationalized private assets. Many of them came with nothing and built lives in Miami, Tampa, and elsewhere in Florida over decades.
They buried their dead in American soil because they built their lives in America. Not as a temporary expedient. As a permanent choice. As a statement that this was now their home.
The idea that the federal government should fund moving those remains back to Cuba - a country still governed by the system that drove their families out - was not received as a thoughtful gesture toward exile sentiment. It was received as a suggestion that they should finish leaving.
The Political Context
Brown-Waite represented a Florida district. She was a Republican, as most Cuban Americans at that time were, which made the political dynamics of her proposal unusual. She appeared to believe that the Cuban exile community had a sentimental attachment to burial in Cuban soil that she could help facilitate.
She had confused the politics of Cuba policy - Cuban Americans’ consistent support for the trade embargo and opposition to the Castro government - with an implicit desire to return. Those are not the same thing. Cuban-American opposition to normalizing relations with Cuba does not mean Cuban Americans want to go back. For many of them, it means the opposite: they will not go back, their dead will not go back, their lives and their cemeteries are here, and any politics that suggests otherwise is not politics in their interest.
The Lesson in the Blunder
What Brown-Waite’s proposal reveals is a fundamental misreading of what the Cuban exile identity in South Florida actually is. It treats exile as a temporary condition - something to be resolved by returning - rather than as an identity that has been built over fifty years in the United States.
Cuban Americans are not Cubans who happen to live in Florida. They are Americans - hyphenated Americans, with a specific and painful relationship to a specific country, but Americans. Their grandparents are buried in Miami. Their children were born in Coral Gables. Their culture is an American culture, a Miami culture, a Cuban-American culture that is not the same as the culture of the island from which their families came.
No U.S. politician should need a $75 million federal program to figure this out.
The Broader Pattern
The Brown-Waite story is not unique in the catalog of non-Latino politicians misjudging Latino communities. It is part of a pattern in which politicians see Latino voters as a monolithic bloc with simple, predictable desires - and then propose things based on that misreading that reveal they have not listened to the community they claim to represent.
The Cuban-American community has specific politics, specific history, and specific sensitivities that come from specific experiences. Those experiences include watching a government seize everything their families built and then claim to speak in their name.
The suggestion that the U.S. government should help move their remains to that country’s soil was not received as help. It was received as its own kind of insult.
Brown-Waite represented Florida. She may have needed a longer conversation with her constituents about what, exactly, they were still angry about.