By Marcela Sanchez
Special to washingtonpost.com

After the 2000 presidential election, Cuban-American bragged that they put President Bush in the White House—and with good reason. Bush won Florida, and therefore the presidency, thanks in large part to capturing 82 percent of the Cuban-American vote.

Bush demonstrated his gratitude quickly. Three months into office he nominated Otto Reich, a Cuban-American and prominent anti-Castro figure, as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. Reich could not win confirmation, yet Bush continued to name others with similar credentials to posts throughout his administration. The popular perception both here and in Latin America was that U.S. policy toward the region would take a very definite anti-Castro bent.

After 9/11, Bush officials such as John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, began calling Castro an imminent terrorist threat. Although the label failed to stick, it did create the illusion that the Bush administration was going to do something drastic about Castro.

As the 2004 election approached, Bush again heated up the rhetoric against Castro. He formed a presidential commission chaired by Secretary of State Colin Powell that produced a 500-page report with recommendations to accelerate the transition toward a free Cuba.

The heat seemed to pay off when Bush took Florida again this year. But closer scrutiny of the numbers shows that a growing number of some Cuban-American voters, the GOP's most reliable Latino base, walked away from Bush.

In voting precincts with more than 75 percent Hispanics, there was “between a 3 and a 5 percent shift in the Cuban vote toward the Democrats,” according to Dario Moreno, a Cuban-American politics expert at Florida International University. In Miami-Dade County, where 75 percent of Hispanic voters are Cuban-American, the elections department claims that Bush slipped 10 percentage points compared to 2000.

Anecdotal evidence fleshes out what the numbers hint at -- current U.S. Cuba policy is out of touch with a growing segment of Cuban-Americans. To some it is simply stuck; to others it is working against their interests and those of family members in Cuba.

After the presidential commission finished its work, the Bush administration implemented two of its harshest recommendations: tougher restrictions on travel and strict limits on remittances and parcels sent to the island.

To many Cuban exiles, these sanctions seem inhumane. Last year as many as 125,000 traveled to Cuba to visit relatives and about 31,000 went more than once. Thousands of Cuban exiles sent an average of 50,650 gift parcels a month, including clothing and personal hygiene items, to relatives on the island. Now travel is limited to once every three years and parcels must contain only medical supplies and food.

One prominent activist turned against the Republicans altogether when the Bush administration's Cuba policy failed to evolve beyond anti-Castro posturing. Joe Garcia, former executive director of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) and once outspoken critic of the Clinton administration's handling of the Elian Gonzalez saga, now became the voice of the New Democrat Network's effort to court Cuban voters in Florida. In television ads aired in the state, Garcia decried what he called the demagoguery of Republican policy and pleaded for voters to “act responsibly."

But it doesn't take becoming a Democrat to begin rethinking the Cuba strategy. Prominent Cuban-American leaders like to point out that Mel Martinez, who will become the first Cuban-American senator in U.S. history, privately disagrees with some of the restrictions.

Martinez claimed the Senate seat for Republicans by defeating Democrat Betty Castor, but perhaps more significantly he soundly defeated a more hard-line anti-Castro Republican candidate during the primaries. Jorge Mas Santos, the current chairman of the CANF, seemed exhilarated by the arrival of a more moderate Cuban voice to the U.S. Congress. Martinez “agrees with helping Cubans keep the family ties and, at the same time, isolate Castro," he said, indicating that Martinez would help modify the restrictions that are adversely affecting those family ties.

Cuban exiles are by no means united against Bush's recent restrictions, just as they do not uniformly see the ongoing embargo as a productive or destructive policy. Bush, in fact, was listening to the hard-liners when he approved the measures. What is clear is that Cuban internal disagreements are only bound to grow with a generational shift. And Bush's loss of some ground among Cuban-Americans should offer a cautionary tale about the risk of ignoring the concerns of the more moderate.