By Peter Wallsten

Times Staff Writer

The battle for traditionally Republican Cuban American voters in Florida is escalating in the presidential campaign's final week as both sides blanket the state's southern region with sharply worded, narrowly targeted television advertisements.

The latest escalation comes Monday, when a group opposing President Bush launches a spot featuring a prominent Cuban exile leader urging GOP voters to take a stand against Republican "demagoguery."

Strategists for the New Democrat Network, one of the so-called 527 groups attacking Bush, say the ad will air in Spanish and English in Miami during the campaign's final week — a $150,000 investment that is one of the most substantial efforts yet to draw Cuban Americans from Bush.

The anti-Bush ad comes as the president's campaign is airing a Spanish-language spot of its own featuring images of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and attacking Sen. John F. Kerry for voting against key sanctions designed to crack down on the dictator and accusing the Democratic presidential candidate of helping the communist leader remain in power.

Recent polls indicate that Bush's support among Cuban Americans — 80% of whom backed him in 2000 — has slipped. Bush's 2000 success, which proved vital to his razor-thin win in Florida — came amid outrage over the Clinton administration's decision to return young refugee Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba.

Democrats this year hope to approach the 40%-support level President Clinton won among Cuban Americans when he carried Florida in his reelection victory.

Bush has been criticized by some exile leaders for policies this year that tightened restrictions on family visits to Cuba and on the amount of money Cuban Americans can send home.

The presidential race has exposed a growing rift in the once-loyal GOP bloc, with older hard-liners backing the restrictions to punish Castro and younger Cuban Americans more eager to maintain family ties on the island while still opposing the long-time dictator.

The new anti-Bush spot is likely to touch nerves in Miami's Little Havana coffee shops and on South Florida's high-octane Spanish talk-radio shows with its blunt argument that more than 40 years of loyalty to the Republican Party has resulted in little gain for the community.

The ad features images of a Cuban American man washing his car in his driveway in 1962 and 1979, in both cases with a Spanish song playing on the radio celebrating the GOP-Cuban alliance. Then it shows an older version of the same man, listening to the same tune in 2004 — when Democrat Joe Garcia walks into the frame and turns off the radio.

"Enough is enough," said Garcia, who began working for the New Democrat Network.

"There comes a time when we have to act responsibly," he says in the ad. "I've taken a stand. Will you?"

The screen fades to black, and he concludes: "Republicans, stop the demagoguery about Cuba."

Strategists for the New Democrat Network, which is spending millions of dollars on ads targeting Latino voters from Florida to New Mexico, say the new ad is designed to neutralize a traditional Republican advantage in the eyes of "persuadable" Cuban American voters — and encourage them to choose Kerry based on domestic concerns such as jobs, tax cuts and healthcare.