Cuban Americans Stance on No Kings Day Protests
HAVANA TIMES – Today, in various cities and towns across the United States, the No Kings Day II protest is taking place—a mobilization called by migrant organizations and progressive groups to reject the authoritarian policies of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant measures.
Former Cuban American congressman Joe García, in exclusive statements to La Joven Cuba, explained that this day is “basically a way to build resistance or to ask the administration to take a different stance.”
In his message, he directed his criticism toward the Cuban American diaspora, traditionally aligned with conservative positions. “What’s most shocking is to see the Cuban community, which so often clamors for democracy and freedom in Cuba, remain overwhelmingly silent in the face of these violations of our constitutional and civil rights,” he said.
The contradiction is glaring: a diaspora that prospered thanks to favorable immigration policies now, for the most part, stays silent about the abuses suffered by others. “Cubans have had the good fortune of a generous immigration law that has been part of our community’s success.” A privilege that has not translated into solidarity with those facing persecution or deportation.
In Miami, the epicenter of much of the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan community, the march has a special meaning. In that city, long presented as a land of freedom, detentions, deportations, and immigration raids have multiplied against the very groups that once found political refuge there.
A symbol of that shift is visible in Hialeah, “the most Hispanic city in the country,” which signed an agreement with ICE to collaborate in immigration raids. “A police force that is overwhelmingly Latino, a commission that is completely Latino, and they’ve lent themselves to this,” García commented in another recent interview.
The former congressman has been particularly critical of the role of Cuban American leaders in this moment. “You can’t be loyal to Donald Trump and at the same time defend immigrants,” he stated.
The No Kings Day II protest seeks precisely to confront that kind of forgetfulness. In a country where the president faces multiple criminal trials, thousands of people are taking to the streets to remind everyone that “democracy is upheld through struggle, not by sitting at home,” insisted the Democratic politician.
A massive turnout is expected—more than five million people and thousands of demonstrations nationwide—in what organizers anticipate will be the largest protest in modern US history.
But the meaning of this mobilization goes beyond Trump. It centers on a society that seems to have forgotten its foundational values—especially a significant portion of Cuban Americans, particularly Republicans, who harshly criticize the Cuban government’s political discrimination 90 miles away, yet reproduce it the first chance their own party holds power.
From Miami, many of those who call for resistance and urge Cubans on the island to take to the streets in defense of freedom watch impassively as mothers are deported and separated from their children. It is ironic that many who demand democracy fail to practice it in the country that has taken them in.
They demand freedom for Cuba but tolerate abuses in their own surroundings, claiming the right to decide—according to their political convenience—who gets to stay and who deserves to be part of the increasingly fragile US American dream.
First published in Spanish by Joven Cuba and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.