Image courtesy of Gage Skidmore via flickr
Over the course of the last week I’ve heard several reports about how Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio may have “embellished” a bit over the course of many interviews in which he discussed his family history. The story, as he told it, was that his parents came over from Cuba in 1959 to get away from the Castro regime. The problem is that his parents actually came over in 1956, before Castro was even IN Cuba.
Senator Rubio has stated in recent interviews that his family had always intended to return to Cuba but that Castro being in power prevented them from doing so. He also points out that he was simply repeating “family lore.” One reporter, however, has noted that Senator Rubio has always been very clear on the fact that his brother was six years old when his family came over from Cuba, and his brother was born in 1950. Either Senator Rubio is horrible at basic arithmetic or he “embellished” to make his family history more sympathetic to Cuban-American voters.
If you don’t live in Florida you probably don’t understand how likely the latter scenario is. The whole Cuba issue is a pretty big deal down here, and the Cuban-American exile community is very influential in our politics (especially in the Miami-Dade area of the state). The three year gap between those moves could possibly represent two very different political realities to those voters. Someone who moved over in 1956 could be seen as a deserter who fled the country during a time of need and inadvertently helped create the environment that let Castro take power in the first place. Someone who moved over in 1959, however, could represent the huge number of people who faced persecution under the Castro regime. There are, obviously, countless other scenarios that could have inspired someone to leave their home country at any particular time, but Senator Rubio himself brought the political reasons into this so it is fair to assume that, whatever the real reason was, the political mood in Cuba had something to do with his family feeling their homeland.
The long story short here is that it’s fairly safe to say that Rubio made up some shit about his past in order to help him get elected.
I’m waiting for someone to tell me what the big deal about this is.