Cuba-US relations: Cold War thaw warms up US presidential debate, starting with Florida

Because the state, where most Cuban-Americans live, offers so many Electoral College votes, winning it is essential for presidential candidates

A campaigner holds a poster of the Cuban Five, the last of whom were released as part of US-Cuba talks (AP)

The surprise decision by President Barack Obama to end decades of Cold War enmity with Cuba has instantly become a part of 2016 presidential calculus, with leading White House aspirants from the Republican and Democratic parties taking opposite positions.

The stakes may be highest for Hillary Clinton, who in spite of the political dangers took little time to side with Mr Obama, arguing in a statement that “isolation has only strengthened the Castro regime’s grip on power”. If she runs in 2016, her endorsement of the policy shift would doubtless make her a target of those Cuban-Americans living in Florida for whom any rapprochement with Havana remains anathema.

She will be relying on growing evidence that once-huge support among the roughly two million Cuban-Americans for maintaining the embargo, which the US imposed on Cuba in late 1960, has greatly fragmented in recent years.

Because Florida, where most Cuban-Americans live, offers so many Electoral College votes, winning it is essential for candidates in a presidential election. For Republicans especially there is no path to the White House without Florida if the race is even slightly tight.

The Cuba bombshell came just one day after former Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced he was “actively exploring” seeking the Republican nomination in 2016. His joining the race would create a significant challenge for Ms Clinton in Florida. Then, on Wednesday, he took a different course from her on Cuba, condemning Mr Obama’s decision to normalise relations and seek an end to the embargo.

“I don’t think we should be negotiating with a repressive regime to make changes in our relationship,” Mr Bush declared. Meanwhile Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who is also weighing a 2016 run, called the change “the latest attempt by President Obama to appease rogue regimes at all costs”.

In fact, both Mr Bush and Ms Clinton had already put themselves in their respective boxes over Cuba. The former governor had only recently told a group of supporters in Miami that he thought extending a hand to Havana would be wrong until full democratic and human rights reforms had been undertaken. Ms Clinton wrote extensively of her support for ending the embargo in her recent memoir.

Fidel Castro: it is only the assassination attempts that have kept him going for the past 50 years (Reuters)

If some expected hardline Cuban-Americans to spill onto the streets of Little Havana to express their fury on Wednesday night, they were disappointed. The protesters who did come out, accusing Mr Obama variously of treason and appeasement, were in the end relatively small in number. That seems to reflect changing attitudes in the community as the younger generation becomes politically engaged.

Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist who led Mr Obama’s re-election in the state in 2012, says, “If you’re a third-generation Cuban, in your mid-30s, went to college here… things that define your worldview are not Cuban embargo politics.”