For Immediate Release: April 16, 2026
Contact: Susana Ramirez, Press Coordinator, Cuban Americans for Cuba, contact@ca4c.org
New York, New York — Today, the Miami Herald published a poll claiming 79% of Cuban Americans support some form of military intervention in Cuba. Cuban Americans for Cuba is calling it what it is: a poll designed to manufacture consent for a military invasion, not to understand what our community actually thinks.
“No diaspora community has the right to drag the entire country into a foreign war to settle decades-old political grievances,” said Danny Valdes, founder of Cuban Americans for Cuba. “This poll was built to push a narrative, not to find the truth.”
The Miami Herald survey sampled 800 Cubans and Cuban Americans in four South Florida counties — the political base and former congressional district of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration’s most aggressive advocate for military action against Cuba, and home to the congressional delegation most invested in this outcome. Representatives María Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, and Mario Díaz-Balart all represent districts within the counties surveyed and have built their careers on hardline Cuba policy. Presenting a poll of their own constituents as a national mandate is not strategic intelligence — it is a political bloc calling its own echo chamber a consensus. There are roughly 2.5 million Cuban Americans across the United States. This poll does not reflect the views of our entire community.
For a Trump administration facing serious questions about its judgment on Iran, outsourcing Cuba policy to a South Florida ideological enclave and using it to justify military intervention against a sovereign nation is not the posture of a serious foreign policy operation. It is the settling of a decades-old grudge on the American taxpayer’s dime.
“As Americans have already seen with the war in Iran, military intervention costs American lives and American dollars,” said Valdes. “It would devastate ordinary Cubans — including the families of Cuban Americans across this country. It would not produce democracy. It would produce destruction.”
“This poll privileges the views of Cuban Americans who have been disconnected from the island for decades, while ignoring entirely what the Cuban people themselves actually want for their own country,” said Valdes. “In just two months, our organization has gathered nearly 500 signatures from Cuban Americans from all over the country on our open letter calling for engagement with Cuba. When we get to 800, will the Herald publish it as definitive?”
The poll’s own framing raises further questions about its intentions. The survey questions conflate humanitarian aid with military intervention, shaping respondents’ answers before they are even given. And the pollster’s own characterization of the results — “it might as well be 1961 again” — inadvertently confirms what this poll is actually measuring: Cold War grievance, not current community consensus.
Cuba is a sovereign country. Military intervention without a congressional vote would be an illegal act of war — and the history of U.S. military action in Cuba does not inspire confidence that this time would be different.
“Any honest discussion of what intervention means has to reckon with civilian casualties,” said Valdes. “This poll does not.”
The FIU Cuba Poll, the most rigorous longitudinal survey on Cuban American opinion conducted since 1991, consistently shows a community far more complex than this framing suggests. Three in four Cuban Americans say the embargo has not worked. Strong majorities support medicine and food sales to Cuba. Among Cuban Americans not born on the island, a majority opposes continuing the embargo outright.
Cuban Americans for Cuba rejects the premise that our community wants this. And we will keep saying so. We encourage Cuban Americans who want to speak out to sign our open letter, and tell their representatives to back a recent War Powers resolution and a suite of bills that would undo the decades-long U.S. embargo.
“Every Cuban American who signs that letter, who calls their representative, who says ‘not in my name’ — that is the community this poll couldn’t find because it wasn’t looking for us,” said Valdes.