The Washington Post misunderstands Marco Rubio and Cuban exiles, professor says

The Ticket

The Washington Post story accusing Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, of embellishing the circumstances under which his Cuban parents came to the United States has been heavily criticized by Floridians, including by a political reporter for the Miami Herald.

In the latest salvo, a University of Miami professor who is a self-disclosed Democrat wrote the Herald Friday to accuse The Post of misunderstanding what it means to be a Cuban exile.

Andy S. Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies wrote:

Marco Rubio's family was forced to stay in America because they refused to live under a communist system. That makes them exiles. It makes no difference what year you first arrived. The fundamental Cuban exile experience is not defined according to what year Cubans left, but rather by the simple, painful reality that they could not return to their homelands to live freely.

Gomez criticized the Post's statement that connections to the post-revolution exile community offer Florida politicians a "cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion." Gomez wrote:

This is simply false. I have spent my career studying the Cuban exile community and can say with authority that no distinction is made within the exile community between those who arrived in the years leading up to the revolution, and those who came after. They all share the painful heritage of not being able to return home.

Rubio on Friday hit back at the newspaper in an op-ed for Politico. Read more about reaction from Rubio and others at The Ticket.

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