Author: Ceresa, Robert M.
Publishing Year: 2017.
Title: Cuban American Political Culture and Civic Organization.
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan.
From
the standpoint of proofreading and editing, the literature is mediocre because
of certain redundancies. Whether this is due to insufficient editing or done
deliberately to try to drive down a specific narrative, as the material is
intended for college students, is unclear. There are also parts where the writer
expresses himself obscurely which repeatedly forces the reader to reread a
sentence or paragraph to decipher precisely what he intends to say, as it lacks
clarity. Because this is not a book review, I will not discuss specifics in
this paper but will be reviewing the text in a separate book review later.
Ceresa’s
research assists in understanding the Cuban culture relative to Cuban voters
and why voting rights for most Cubans is fundamental to life. In Chapter 5 Political Theory as Political Culture he
provides insight into how the Cuban culture approaches politics and the
community they construct and identify with. He highlights how one’s political
culture is reflected in the “shared values, beliefs, and identity and interest
people inherit from their social network (Ceresa. 2017:77). The construction of
micro-societies with local communities is analyzed and discussed in this
chapter which serves as background education for the analysist of a project
such as this paper. For the Cubans, the ideals they construct within their own
micro-society, such as for example the Republican Club of South Dade, start at
the local level and pro-actively reaches out to the state and national level.
They are based on relationship and report building at the local level, which
Ceresa theorizes is how the Cuban voters also nurture their political society
and commitment to ideals (Ceresa. 2017:78).
Ceresa
appears to be openly biased and not surprisingly anti-Republican (Ceresa.
2017:3). He does not shy away from calling Fidel Castro a hero (ibid) nor applaud Obama’s attempt to
reverse the hardliner stand that the United States and Cuban Miamians have
taken against communist Cuba since early 1960’s, as he makes an effort to
mention, as though pro-Muslim Obama identifies himself with Catholicism during
his visit to the Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre in Coconut Grove, Miami, as
“the US president to pay his respect there” (Ceresa. 2017:4). I find it
interestingly ironic that Ceresa would praise Obama for this fake visit to Our
Lady of Charity of El Cobre in Coconut Grove, Miami in an attempt to court
Cuban Americans, who are predominately Catholic, as though they are oblivious
to Obama’s religious affiliation.
While
Cuban American Political Culture and
Civic Organizing can be used selectively as material for the gaining
background knowledge of the Cuban American political identity and for an
understanding of what might have played a role in the shifting of some Cuban
American voters to Non-Party Affiliated voters, it fails to convince me as
statistics from Miami Dade County Government demonstrates over an eight year
period, while the pro-Marxist agenda of the Obama Administration worked to pull
voters away from conservatism, that Democrat voter registrations among Hispanics
is dropping. What Ceresa may be relying on is that most students who will be
reading his book will not bother to double check if the statistics supports his
claims. Ceresa researches Cuban Americans in Miami from 2007-2017, which
skillfully coincides with the Obama Era, but because of the publishing date of
his work, it is not reflective of the Cuban American political scene during the
2018 Midterm Election, which the Greiner and Gladwin’s report from FIU’s Cuban
Research Institute demonstrates the opposite of.
One
thing that struck me as suspicious was his admiration for communist and
political activist, Saul Alinsky (Ceresa. 2017:vii), who is known for his
radical leftist perspectives, though he never joined the socialist party, and
his book Rules for Radicals (1971).
He is known for his work in the so-called New
Socialist Movement, a movement which subscribes to the idea of New World
Order in which they progress their far-leftist agenda through government
handouts. Knowing that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are influenced by
Saul Alinsky’, Clinton writing her thesis on Alinsky, and Ceresa revealing his
admiration for Alinsky, this aids to explain convincingly his advocacy for
making the readers think Cuban Americans are turning leftist oriented. He uses
persuasive argumentation techniques but fails to provide hardcore facts. The
only thing missing here presently is proof, such a copy of bank transfer or a
cancelled check, where Ceresa received funding for his research project from. I
have my suspicions.
