Cuban-American actress Natalie Morales (Battle of the Sexes) has a few thoughts about why so many Cubans in Florida voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election. Trump won the state by about three percentage points and outperformed with Latino voters, specifically Cubans in Miami-Dade County.
As the daughter of Cuban refugees, Morales says Republicans are able to pull so much support from Cuban and other Latino voters because “they use and abuse the trauma of my people” by putting out misinformation about how all Democrats are “radical socialist commies.”
“This applies to Cubans, but also Venezuelans and all the other Latinx people who fled from poverty and violent, oppressive regimes,” she wrote on Twitter this week. “The BS they see on Fox News has made them truly scared of Bernie [Sanders] and anyone like him. Even Latina AOC.”
Morales feels that when Cubans and Venezuelans hear about equality through Democratic Socialism, they just don’t believe it because they’ve been lied to before.
“They were sold the same promises in their countries,” she tweeted. “But those promises turned sour. They turned communist. They turned into Castro. Into Maduro. They turned into suffering and fleeing and death and trauma.”
She added that although she has some friends and family in Miami who voted for Trump, they are not racist. Instead, they are “10000% brainwashed.” It’s not that they “actually like Trump,” they are simply scared of the country moving too far to the left.
“They are terrified, to the point of tears, of exactly what the Republicans manipulated them to be afraid of – that the other choice is worse,” Morales wrote on Twitter. “They’ve said to me, ‘[Joe] Biden is just going to do what Bernie says. [He’s] just saying what we want to hear, but he’s a communist.’”
Her other theory, she says, “runs deeper.” She believes that immigrants and refugees who fled communist countries like Cuba feel so much love and appreciation for the U.S. that they can sometimes unconsciously assimilate for a country that “saved them.”
“It’s not easy to come here and be accepted when you look different and speak another language,” Morales tweeted. “And you work hard to lose your accent and dress like they do and make your hair like theirs…so that you fit in.”
Living as a “proud American” for decades, these immigrants and refugees know they never want to go back to their former lives. So, when Republicans use fearmongering tactics to say that’s what Democrats are going to give them, they run the other way and embrace the party that pushes back on that idea.
“It’s the same psychology that happens when you’re a dorky kid in middle school and suddenly get in with the popular crowd,” she tweeted. “You reject your old, loyal dorky friends because you don’t want to be associated with the shunned. You don’t want to go back to being rejected yourself. It’s a type of colonized self-hatred that I think every minority deals with.”