Democrats see chance to unseat 3 Cuban-Americans

By JOHN LANTIGUA, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

MIAMI - "What are you, crazy?"

Jeff Garcia, a Democratic campaign strategist, is recounting what party bosses in Washington said to him last fall when he broached an idea.

Garcia told them that Democrats could challenge all three of the entrenched Cuban-American, Republican members of Congress from South Florida and maybe beat them in November.

When Garcia started seeking candidates, he encountered the same reaction.

"At first they thought I was crazy, too," he says, "but then I started showing them the numbers."

In the past six weeks, three Democrats have thrown their hats into the ring:

• Annette Taddeo, 40, a Colombian-American businesswoman, will challenge 18th District U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a 19-year congressional veteran.
• Former Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez, 58, is running in the 21st District against Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a 15-year congressman.
• Joe Garcia, 44, former chariman of the Florida Public Service Commission and of the Miami-Dade County Democratic Party, is up against Mario Diaz-Balart, who is gunning for his fourth term in the relatively new 25th District.

The names Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen are iconic in Cuban Miami, and challenging them will be a chore.

"Running against any incumbent is hard, and running against an incumbent family is even harder," Joe Garcia says of the Diaz-Balart brothers, descendants of a powerful political family in pre-Castro Cuba.

But that brings Jeff Garcia - no relation - back to the numbers.

According to the Democrats, a poll conducted last July revealed that 75 percent of registered voters in District 21 said the Republicans had mismanaged the war in Iraq. In District 25, that figure was 76 percent.

In a separate poll conducted last fall in District 18, 73 percent of potential voters said they opposed the war, according to the Democrats.

All three GOP incumbents have backed President Bush's Iraq policy even as public support for the war has waned. The three challengers say the next president must find a way to end major U.S. military involvement relatively soon.

"We need to find a way out," says Joe Garcia, who has called the incumbents "lapdogs" for their unflagging support of Bush's policies.

The polls, according to the Democrats, also showed that a majority of voters in Districts 21 and 25 opposed new hard-line policies adopted by Bush on Cuba.

As of 2004, Cuban-Americans can visit relatives on the island only once every three years instead of every year, and the amount of money they can send legally to those loved ones was slashed.

Even among Cubans, the Democratic poll in Districts 21 and 25 indicated that more potential voters favored easing those restrictions. With Cubans making up at least 40 percent of likely voters in all three districts, the issue could determine a crucial number of votes.

The Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen sponsored those changes.

Meanwhile, the challengers say they would maintain the 46-year-old trade embargo against Cuba until there was real political change there, but they would vote to end the new restrictions on travel and remittances.

"The current restrictions on Cuban families are counterproductive," Taddeo says. "My family values tell me family members shouldn't be divided."

The Democrats also stress that the incumbents voted three times against expansion of a federal program, known as SCHIP, to help states provide health insurance for children of the lower middle class.

"We have a half-million uninsured people in South Florida, including kids," Martinez says. "When they voted against SCHIP, they voted against their own people."

The challengers also say they would vote to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

While the challengers insist they are running independent campaigns, they hit many of the same notes. But so have the incumbents over the years, in particular about maintaining a hard line on Cuba.

Political observers expect the battles to get brutal, especially in Districts 21 and 25. Already, Lincoln Diaz-Balart has told Spanish-language talk radio that the Democratic candidates are all involved in a global conspiracy to end the trade embargo and help the Castro regime.

That is the kind of rhetoric that in the past rallied Republicans in his heavily Cuban district. But Democrats are banking on the fact that many older, more conservative Cuban voters have died and that Cubans who have arrived since the Mariel boatlift of 1980 are more likely to have close family in Cuba who need their help.

"For the very first time, the Democratic candidates are going to have a different position on Cuba than the Republicans do," says Joe Garcia. "It's not enough anymore to say you are against Fidel."

He says he will go after Mario Diaz-Balart on issues crucial to South Floridians.

"The Everglades is part of the district, but he's nowhere on the environment," Garcia says. "He sits on the transportation committee, but we have no funding for mass transit."

Martinez also says he will stick to meat-and-potatoes politics. He says that of all 25 Florida members of Congress, Lincoln Diaz-Balart is 19th in the amount of federal funding he has attracted to his district. Martinez says he can do better.

One big issue will be fund-raising. The latest figures show Ros-Lehtinen with $1.8 million, Lincoln Diaz-Balart with $900,000 and his brother with $465,000. The challengers, meanwhile, have just started to raise money and have released no figures.

But in the end, the Democrats are hoping that the electorate will simply sweep out the ruling Republicans - even the Cuban-Americans.

Jeff Garcia sees better sailing ahead.

"We have the wind at our backs," he says.