How the White House race looks from Cuba: The Havana primaries

Cubans are not keen on a president from the diaspora

NEITHER Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio fared as well in the hills of New Hampshire on February 9th as they did in the plains of Iowa a week earlier. Even so, the two Republicans (pictured) are both closer to winning the White House than any Cuban-American has come before. You might expect the citizens of the country from which their parents emigrated to take an interest in their political fortunes, and they do. But it is not a friendly one. “I’d rather vote for Donald Trump,” harrumphs a professor in Vedado, part of Havana.

To judge from informal conversations and press chatter (nobody is systematically canvassing opinion) Cubans are underwhelmed by the prospect of a Cuban-American president. A big part of the reason is that both Mr Cruz and Mr Rubio are hardliners on the subject of Cuba, the traditional stance of émigrés and their families. Mr Rubio, who is the better known because he is a senator from nearby Florida, would roll back the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States initiated by the countries’ presidents in 2014. He has threatened to put Cuba back on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Mr Cruz is no friendlier to the new policy. The Obama administration is “being played by brutal dictators”, among them Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro, he thunders.

Mr Rubio “is the one who represents interests associated most with the politics of Bushiana,” wrote a commenter on the state-controlled Granma website, blackening him with George W. Bush’s reviled name. Some Cubans express pity for the Cuban-American duo, seeing them as dupes of the Miami-based diaspora, which is traditionally hostile to Cuba’s government (though it is warming to the idea of better relations). The candidates’ ideas are based on outdated stories that their exiled parents told them, says the professor.

Several habaneros summed up their sense of betrayal with a well-worn expression: No hay peor astilla que la del mismo palo (“There is no splinter worse than one from the same stick”). Messrs Cruz and Rubio, in other words, spurn their own kind. “Unfortunately, it’s kind of a Cuban trait,” laments a rueful doctor.

Of all the front-runners, the one whose philosophy is closest to that of Cuba’s leaders is Bernie Sanders, a Democratic senator from Vermont, who calls himself a “democratic socialist”. Cubans, who live with undemocratic socialism, seem to find this baffling rather than attractive. “Has anyone told him that socialism is a bad thing?” whispers a secretary in her office on the Malecón, Havana’s oceanfront esplanade.

Donald Trump gets the most press coverage, as in the United States, but does not enrage Cubans as he does Mexicans. When Mr Trump fumes about immigrants, Cubans sense he does not mean them.

The clear favourite to win the Havana primary is Hillary Clinton, who has promised to continue Barack Obama’s opening toward Cuba. When it comes to rooting for a candidate to be the next occupant of the White House, Cubans seem to want continuity, not change.