The immigrant community that could vote Democrat for the first time – and spell the end of Donald Trump

Clinton supporters in Florida’s Cuban-American community look at Trump and see a Chavez or Castro

Cuban Americans in South Florida are at war with one another over the critical part their community will play in deciding who will win Florida on Tuesday, some convinced it will give Hillary Clinton the crucial extra votes to put her over the top, others adamant the opposite will happen.

“This is the first time we are going to have a Cuban majority voting for the left of centre,” Patrick Hidalgo, a former Deputy Director of Public Engagement in the Obama White House, declared from the small stage at The Ball and Chain, a restaurant and bar in Little Havana, Miami, where an energised group of Cuban-Americans for Clinton gathered on Friday night.

Among those at the get-put-the-vote event was Manny Diaz, Mayor of Miami from 2001 to 2009 and a Cuban American, who told The Independent that it is Mr Trump’s near-approximation to Latin dictators like Hugo Chavez and including Fidel Castro that is convincing even older members of the community to vote Democrat, many of them for the first time in their lives.

Yet, elsewhere others deeply involved in the community’s political activism firmly disagree, believing that while its votes in 2012 were evenly split between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, ending five decades of sure-fire support by Cuban Americans for Republican candidates, this year the trend will be reversed with a majority once more going for Mr Trump.

Who is right could have profound consequences. Polls suggest that Florida is again on a knife-edge and any swing one way or another by Cuban Americans, who number 1.2 million in the state, could prove decisive. And by most accounts, should Ms Clinton repeat Mr Obama’s record of winning the state twice, if by tiny margins, she will have extinguished Mr Trump’s White House bid.

The former mayor says even his own 85-year-old mother, part of the generation of Cuban Americans who have supported Republicans ever since President John F Kennedy failed to give military support to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro’s Cuba in 1961, will vote Clinton.

“They see Trump and it reminds them too much of a Castro or a Chavez because of that sort of ‘caudillo’ dictator type of person. You know, ‘elections are rigged, we’ve got to get rid of elections’. What does that mean… are we going to have a revolution? As soon as I get elected I am going to throw my opponent in jail? I mean that’s the kind of thing you see in Third World countries, right?” he said. “I think that’s having a very bad impact on Trump.”

Carmen Peláez, a film-maker who is first-generation Cuban-American, sees much the same thing. “If you look at Trump’s pattern, it is identical to the patterns of Fidel Castro, to Chavez, to any dictator that has taken over and destroyed any country in Latin America,” she offered. “They try to censor the press, they make excuses for their failures, they demonise their enemies, they are misogynistic and racist, they always try to scape-goat.”

“I would disagree,” Carlos Diaz, a professor of government studies at Harvard University, said in response to the former mayor’s prediction. (They are old friends.) “He is probably saying that as a Democrat first. I think we can see that Latin Americans can tend to like strong leadership and there is a fine line between strong leaders and autocratic leadership. If you like strong leadership and you think the country is going in the wrong direction, you want a strong leader.”

Mr Trump’s record on the Cuba issue is mixed. Recent reporting by Newsweek magazine revealed that his casino companies paid for consultants, in a deliberately roundabout way, to visit the communist nation in the 1990s to scout possibilities for a Trump development there. Though nothing came of that trip, it was in of itself a violation of the US embargo on Cuba, experts told the magazine. Mr Trump has yet to explain the nature of the foray. Meanwhile, asked last year by The Daily Caller, a conservative publication, what he thought of President Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba, he replied: “I think it’s fine, I think it’s fine, but we should have made a better deal. The concept of opening with Cuba – 50 years is enough – the concept of opening with Cuba is fine. I think we should have made a stronger deal.”

Recently he has tied himself to old-guard Cuban-American thinking that the embargo that Mr Obama wants lifted should stay. During a recent visit to Miami, he met with the Bay of Pigs Veterans’ Association and accused Mr Obama and Ms Clinton of “helping” the Cuban regime.

Professor Diaz believes Ms Clinton’s chances with the community were damaged by two recent acts by President Obama: the decision for the first time in decades to abstain in a UN Security Council vote condemning the US embargo and a new executive measure allowing US visitors to return from the island with unlimited amounts of rum and cigars. “That was a big blow to the older generation in Miami, and they are the ones who vote,” he said of the UN abstention.

Among younger Cuban Americans who have largely abandoned the pro-embargo fixations of their parents, Jesus Suarez, 32, stands out. When not at the Miami law firm where he works, he takes the time to appear in local media whenever possible to advocate for Mr Trump. He is infuriated by the notion he is a man who might flout the law in the manner of an autocrat, arguing that it is Ms Clinton who has shown herself unwilling to respect the laws of the land.

“Hillary Clinton has a very shaky relationship with the rule of law. She, if she is elected, will be the first president-elect who will come into office under federal investigation,” he argued this weekend. “The way that Secretary Clinton served as Secretary of State on the one hand while her husband was running around the world collecting money from foreign governments was not only corrupt but it jeopardised national security. They think they are above the law and that puts them square in the same camp as Castro, Maduro and Chavez.”

One who believes he has his finger on the pulse of the community is Juan Cuba – actually a Peruvian American – the head of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. He, perhaps unsurprisingly, sides with those who think Mr Trump is turning off more Cuban Americans in part because of his early insults directed at “rapist” and “criminal” Mexican immigrants.

“The majority of Cuban Americans understand the Cuban embargo has not worked. They agree with the lifting of travel restriction so that Cuban Americans can visit their families back on the island. They agree with easing diplomat relations because that will help the people on the island. Those are things that Donald Trump wants to reverse on day one.”