“Not all Cubans are MAGA”: The Cuban women who broke with the GOP

Maria Eugenia Laurencio—who was 12 years old when her family left Cuba and settled in Beaumont, Texas— was a lifelong Republican. When her parents became US citizens, they registered as Republicans. “We hated Kennedy,” she told me, referring to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that led many exiles to permanently abandon the Democratic Party. 

Laurencio, a retired anesthesiologist who now lives in Miami, followed in her parents’ footsteps, happily supporting the Republican ticket, from Ronald Reagan to both George Bushes. In 2015, excited at the prospect of having the first Cuban-American president, she volunteered for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, phone banking and canvassing for him in Miami. “He was not radical at the time,” she told me. She liked his pro-immigrant and anti-communist views, and his public dislike—back then—of Donald Trump. “I never liked him, not even when he was a TV star,” she told me about Trump. “I really couldn’t conceive that he would be president.”

But when Rubio lost the primary, Laurencio knew she had only one option if she wanted to stop Trump from winning: Vote for Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, Laurencio says she cried. Surely, she thought, the GOP would not support Trump after his first term in office, punctuated by a flurry of scandals like the impeachment hearings, the separation of thousands of families at the US-Mexico border, and his administration’s haphazard response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the Republican Party backed Trump once again, Laurencio had enough. She registered as a Democrat and voted for Joe Biden. Then came Trump’s denial of the results of the election, the January 6 insurrection, Biden’s presidency, and Trump’s shocking return. In 2024, she voted for Kamala Harris.

Over the years, her decision to switch parties withered ties with friends and family members. She noticed fewer invitations to dinners or other social gatherings. “We continue to be friends, but I notice the coldness,” she told me. “I felt very distraught and alone because I had lost my community.” Then a supportive neighbor showed her a letter to the editor that had appeared in the Miami Herald, written by a group called Cuban American Women Supporting Democracy. Reach out to them, the neighbor suggested.

When she attended her first meeting in 2019, Laurencio was relieved to find a group of like-minded women. “I could express myself and not be looked at as some kind of weirdo or communist, like they all say,” she told me. “I didn’t leave the Republican party. The Republican party left me. It’s not the party of Reagan or George Bush.”

Now, she is part of Cuban American Women Supporting Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that since its official founding in 2023 has championed immigration reform, opposed the book ban in the Miami-Dade County school district, supported abortion rights, voting access, and various local and state political candidates. Their members attend protests, including at the notorious Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention facility, as well as school board meetings. In 2024, they mailed thousands of cards to eligible voters, urging them to support Amendment 4, the failed ballot initiative to preserve the right to an abortion in Florida, which now has a six-week ban.

What started as a WhatsApp group chat among a few acquaintances during Trump’s first term has now grown into a network of about 250 members, many of them, as their name suggests, Cuban women. Miami-Dade County residents are heavily represented, but some members reside elsewhere in Florida. While many of them are lifelong Democrats, others like Laurencio are former Republicans who broke with their party over support of Trump. They are largely retired professionals—ranging in age from the mid-60s to the mid-80s—and include company executives, business owners, engineers, doctors, and published authors. One trait they all share is that they are a minority within the Cuban exile community, which for decades has generously supported the Republican Party, including President Donald Trump. 

“In a sea of red, the blue dots congregate,” said Carolina Camps, president of the group, known by its acronym, CAWSD (pronounced CAUSED). Camps described how effectively, when so many people felt disconnected from others who agreed with them politically, the word-of-mouth process worked. “It was friends of friends of friends, and then beyond that. Now we’ve got people who just hear about it and want to join because they feel at home.”

“We have to let the community know,” Camps added, “not all Cubans are MAGA.”

I first heard about CAWSD when I was covering the end of humanitarian parole protections for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. At a press conference in Miami, one of their members called on Republicans “who believed Trump’s promise to deport immigrants did not include their loved ones, to raise their voices in protest and total disregard for human life.” As the daughter of a Cuban exile and a Miamian myself, I was struck by her words. I’m all too familiar with the deep ties between Cubans and the Republican Party. Seeing a Cuban speaking out against the GOP so publicly got my attention.

I spoke to several members of the group in a Zoom call in April. During our first meeting, they shared stories about what drew them together. Like Laurencio, many felt shunned by their families and social circles. Rosemary Ravinal, a speaker coach living in Miami, recounted how, shortly after Trump won the 2016 election, a cousin asked, “Aren’t you happy we won?” She hasn’t spoken to that cousin since. “There was an assumption that because I’m Cuban, automatically my vote was going to be Republican,” she said. “So there was a great sense of isolation for me after that first term.”

A few years ago, she heard Carolina Camps being interviewed on a local radio station, and Ravinal decided to reach out. “There was a sense of really being so cornered, not being able to talk among my brethren, my people,” Ravinal recalled, “that I felt that finally, there was a little bit of sunlight and a possibility that I could make a difference in terms of shaping issues and moving the community forward.”

Even as the women of CAWSD have rallied against the policies of the Trump administration, among the Cuban exile community support for Republicans has grown—especially over the last decade, according to the Cuba Poll, which Florida International University conducts, regularly surveying Cuban Americans living in Miami-Dade County. 

In the 2016 poll, for instance, conducted before the presidential election, 35 percent of Cuban Americans said they would vote for Trump. In 2024, the most recent poll conducted, that percentage nearly doubled to 68 percent. Meanwhile, support for Democratic candidates dwindled: In 2016, 31 percent of Cuban-American voters polled said they would support Hillary Clinton. In 2024, only 23 percent said they would vote for Kamala Harris. 

I asked historians and political analysts what dynamics had turned the Cuban- exile community into such a GOP monolith. History points to a few key events, they said. Many Cubans of a previous generation lost faith in the Democratic Party following President Kennedy’s decision in the midst of the failed Bay of Pigs operation to pull back support to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime. The Republican Party took advantage of this sentiment when Cubans began to pursue US citizenship following the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, which created a pathway to legalization for them. Spanish-speaking GOP officials attended naturalization ceremonies, passing out pamphlets congratulating newly minted citizens and inviting them to register as Republicans. 

The GOP recruited sons and daughters of the original emigrés into their political ranks, which led to the rise of prominent political figures such as Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban American elected to Congress. “Certainly, the Republican Party earned the Cuba vote,” said Guillermo Grenier, sociology professor at Florida International University and the lead author of the Cuba Poll. The Democratic Party’s focus on social justice wasn’t appealing to many Cubans, Grenier added, while the GOP spoke openly about ending communism. “They put boots on the ground.”

But over the years, allegiance to the Republican Party has not been completely consistent. Many Cuban Americans supported Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, for example, though that support waned, in large part, after his efforts to normalize relations with Cuba failed to create significant political changes on the island. “When the Cuban government refused to engage in serious reforms, both economic and political, there was a huge disappointment in the Cuban American community,” said Sebastián Arcos, interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU. “The pendulum swung back and swung hard in the opposite direction.” Cuban Americans were once more in the Republican fold.

I asked Grenier if he thinks Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda—which has touched many Cuban families in the last year—may pull more votes for Democratic candidates in future elections. ICE arrests of Cubans have increased to about 1,000 a month, according to the Cato Institute. Grenier thinks it’s unlikely. “I don’t think that will happen. Now, they might stay home,” he said. “They might not vote, and that might give an opportunity for some kind of leverage for the Democrats.”

On a recent afternoon, I visited Laurencio at the Mediterranean-style home in Coral Gables, a historic and affluent city on the edge of Miami, where she lives with her husband, a retired ophthalmologist. Palm trees lined the pathway to the entrance, where Laurencio’s orange tabby cat, Lotus, greeted me before Laurencio opened the front doors. We walked toward the kitchen, bathed in sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Bougainvillea bushes of orange and fuchsia could be seen on the pool patio. Laurencio’s refrigerator, decorated with photos of family and cards, included a magnet that said in bold letters, “Is it 2028 yet?” 

As we sat at her kitchen counter, nibbling on cookies and drinking Cuban coffee, more CAWSD members arrived until about five of them were there. They included two retired school counselors, Camps, who worked in sales for a pharmaceutical company, Laurencio, the retired anesthesiologist, and Annie Betancourt, a retired state representative who served in the Florida Legislature between 1994 and 2002. 

Seated on sofas and easy chairs around the family room, the women told me about the issues they have focused on in the last year. They’ve attended the weekend vigils outside Alligator Alcatraz, which shut down in June, as well as joining other demonstrators outside the local ICE office. They’ve helped secure donations for families of people who have been deported. The group has also mailed more than 50,000 postcards to voters with instructions on how to sign up for vote-by-mail. Betancourt, the former state representative, points out that one of the advantages of the group is that their members simply have time to engage with the issues. Most are retired, many with grown children. “It’s the civic engagement component,” she said. “You can stand in line, you can go, you can mobilize.”

I asked what the Democratic Party is missing from their strategy to attract more Cuban voters. Betancourt, who had a front-row seat to internal political discussions for decades, called the Republican Party “extremely focused and methodical.” She saw how carefully they selected candidates who they believed had a strong chance of winning. Democrats have also failed to shake off the socialist label, which, in a city like Miami, is almost insulting, Laurencio said, adding that Democratic candidates need to be very direct and say on the record that they are not communist or socialist. “You cannot allow them to label you,” she said.

Have they heard of any changes of heart among their Republican friends and family? Has anyone become disenchanted with MAGA? Was there anything during this second term that might have unsettled supporters of the president?

Betancourt told the story of a call she had received just that morning from a Republican friend, a former CEO of a Miami company. He wanted to know her opinion of David Jolly, a Democratic candidate for Florida Governor. In a recent call, Laurencio’s 50-year-old nephew told her he regretted having supported Trump. Laurencio, who listens to conservative Spanish radio shows in Miami, hears the dissent growing among callers who complain about inflation, high gas prices, and the current political state of Venezuela and Cuba.

During our first interview, Camps told me about a Republican friend who had recently told her he was unhappy with the current state of the country. “They realize that it’s their neighbors that are being deported, their gardeners are being deported,” she said. “I think that there’s a softening.” Then she added a cautionary note: “Now, whether or not they will vote Democrat—that’s a whole different animal.”

No matter what the future elections bring, the women of CAWSD have built a foundation of solidarity, and even friendship. During our meeting, Esther De Varona, one of the retired counselors, jokingly said, “Gracias, Trump,” evoking chuckles from the other women. She was alluding to the adage in communist Cuba, “Gracias, Fidel.” Because of their mutual opposition to the current president, “we now have this fabulous network,” she told me. “It’s good to have, in a time of darkness and not a lot of positivity, that we have each other.”