Wake up and smell the coffee: Cuban exile Welferianos are now the majority
That's what my mom called them: "welferianos." Since I've lived my entire adult life up north, where we get blizzards in early November and Cubans are as rare as a total solar eclipse, I've never known if she made up the term, or picked it up from her Cuban friends in Chicago. It was a term she always voiced with measurable disgust, in reference to those Cuban exiles who refused to work and lived off the public dole. Gimme, gimme, gimme... dame, dame, dame.... Always on the take, always selfishly living off someone else's work, always proving through their behavior that they hadn't really left Cuba for the sake of freedom, but rather for the sake of better handouts than Castrolandia could provide for them.
She ran into them, even in cold Chicago, where they schemed to find their welfare ticket back to Miami and some government-subsidized housing.
Well, it seems these welferianos have gained the upper hand. This election proved it.
From the Financial Times. A fairly superficial but succinct report on the rise of the "new" Cuban exile voters: the Welferianos who sided with Mariela Castro and voted for the Prince of Redistributionist Handouts.
Cuban-Americans stun Republicans
By Richard McGregor in WashingtonMore Cuban-Americans, once a reliable conservative bulwark in Florida, voted for Barack Obama in Tuesday’s election than Mitt Romney, underscoring the breadth of the demographic wave that engulfed the Republican party.
Mr Obama is leading Mr Romney by 50,000 votes out of 8.3m ballots cast in final counting in Florida, the only state yet to be decided, and is expected to be declared the winner within days. Exit polls in Florida by Fox News and the Pew Research Centre both recorded Mr Obama beating Mr Romney with Cuban-Americans by 49 per cent to 47 per cent.
Other exit polls, including one by the Miami Herald, showed the vote to be more even or with Mr Romney slightly ahead with Cuban-Americans.
But even parity is a triumph for the Obama campaign given the longstanding loyalty of anti-communist Cubans to the Republicans.
“This marks a dramatic realignment of politics in that state,” said Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager.
Republicans will be worried that a community they had long been able to rely on was turning away from the party in Florida, the largest of the swing states and always a prize in the presidential poll.
Continue reading the whole nauseating piece here.
Well let's see, If you are getting food stamps, housing allowance, health care, and every other type of assistance from the gov, why would you want to put an end to that?
Oye!!! hay que votar por obama que el rico Americano ese nos va a quitar todo y no vamos a poder ir a Cuba mas!!
Vamos Bien a casa del carajo.
Alas, the degradation of the Cuban-American community proceeds apace. And yes, it's even worse on the island, perhaps inevitably--much worse, more than many of us can actually imagine. There are many factors involved, but one of them is a problem that dates to colonial times, noted and addressed (to little or no avail) by the likes of Félix Varela and José Martí: the lack of sufficient dignity--la falta de decoro.
Cubans, or too many of them, have always been shallow, short-sighted, credulous, immature and opportunistic. For the zillionth time, no country (especially one that was doing as relatively well as pre-Castro Cuba) ever self-destructs unless too many of its people are SERIOUSLY dysfunctional. And we're still blaming Fidel for the disaster...I mean, it's beyond pathetic.
The first sentence of my last comment should have included ENVIOUS.
All of this was planned a couple of years ago by this nation's left along with Castro. This is not innocent or a sudden change of mind from the part of the Cuban exiled community (despite the random come-mierdas like Cristina Saralegui and Gloria Estefan).
In 1993, under the fear of collapsing along with Eastern Europe, Castro legalized the use of the U.S. dollar and the following year U.S. (Clinton), instead of implanting the same catalyst pressure that was implanted in Eastern Europe, allowed 20,000 Cubans to enter legally each year and start sending dollars to Castroland. This wasn't coincidence, this was clearly done under confabulation and for a mutual interest. It was also at this time that the wet-foot/dry-foot policy was implanted as a reenforcer, and pretext, for the new policy.
Granted, these new wave of Cubans were now hand picked by the state, allowed to return to Cuba any time, and allowed to send hard currency to relatives (currency that once in Cuba is bound to be used in state owned stores for no others are permitted in the stalinist state).
Let's get it correct, these new wave of Cubans are not exiles. These are economic immigrants who Castro knows have no political maturity for he makes sure they don't. We can all tell this is Cuba's riff-raff being sent in droves comfortably through American Airlines and straight to the talk shows while the real exiles are in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador wondering how they are going to eat the next day and get the hell out of there. Castro knew these new wave of handpicked clowns was going to indirectly work for him and weaken the Republican political weight of the exiled community and Florida in general. It is something that benefits Castro, as well as Democrats, and 18 years later, here it is and clearly.
To that add that in 2009 Obama, while talking of putting restrictions on Honduras for ousting a leftist dictator wanna be, eased restrictions on monetary transfers to Cuba. I suppose that when you receive so much campaign money under the table from Venezuela, money whose origin in '08 was "mysterious", there are some favors that must be conceited.
Now, it begs to ask, why did a fool like Bush, who had two terms, not take down these policies before they continued their course. Everywhere you look, it is not calculated trickery it is stupidity. I really don't know how much this nation has left with so much rampant myopicness and stupidity.
Gallardo, you've made a spot-on analysis with regards to Castro and the 'new men/women' he's dumped on us over the past 20 years. He knew what would happen, and as always, was able to manipulate a Democrat, ensuring the survival of his regime. I mean, that's 20,000, plus all the illegals, until Kingdom Come, there's no ending date. He's outsmarted the US Government and the original Exiles, playing us like fools all along, now we're paying the price - can you imagine what will become of Florida's very important 29 Electoral Votes in the coming years with a growing number of his 'minions' registering to vote? Hell, a former Cuban Government official who defected in the 80s wrote a book where he claims to have attended a meeting where Castro stated that if the Democrats had been in power continously for 20 years, Communism would have triumphed worlwide. Frustrating and sad...