At first glance, Marco Rubio seems to be the boy wonder of 2016. On stage during the debates and at campaign appearances, he appears young, handsome, almost cherubic. But anyone who thinks that Rubio is naive, soft or inexperienced would be mistaken. Behind the baby-face features is a street-smart Miami politician and a former football player for whom politics is a contact sport. The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio has made his family story the anthem of all his political campaigns. As told on the campaign trail, it is a moving and compelling story—a hardscrabble, up-from-the-bootstraps, American family saga. His father worked ceaseless shifts as a bartender, his mother scrubbed floors as a hotel maid—all in a single-minded pursuit of a better life for their children in America.

Rubio’s narrative, though, belies a more complicated reality, as the most prominent Hispanic politician in the United States balances his own past with his party’s future. Incubated within Miami’s unique political ecosystem, mentored and guided by el exilio historico, the old guard, he’s risen from Calle Ocho to Tallahassee to Washington. Now Rubio has arrived on the national stage just as U.S.-Cuban relations have shifted dramatically. While he has never visited his ancestral homeland of Cuba, it has defined and influenced every part of his life. And in a wild-card twist of fate, the largest island in the Caribbean has emerged from its half-century cocoon of isolation just in time to play a potentially decisive role in Rubio’s quest to capture the GOP presidential nomination.


Certainly, the rise of the junior U.S. senator from the Sunshine State owes much to the formidable Cuban-American Miami machine. Cuban-Americans generally call themselves exiles—not immigrants—a nod to having been the tossed-out refuse of Fidel Castro, who labeled them gusanos (worms) and escoria (scum). Since the early 1960s, they have morphed into Miami’s kingmakers, deciding state and local elections while dictating national policy on Cuba to U.S. presidents for decades.

As the most successful scion of that power structure, the freshman senator, who has taken an unrelenting hard line on the Castro brothers and on immigration, finds himself confronting deep fault lines with his fellow Hispanics, a new generation of Cuban-Americans

and even a U.S. president who sees reestablishing ties to the island as one of his signature accomplishments. Today, the 44-year-old is caught between an older intransigent generation of Cuban-Americans who are passing from the scene and a younger, growing generation of Central and Latin American Hispanics who face a very different immigrant experience in the U.S. and who resent the special treatment afforded his fellow Cubans.

While the 2016 campaign is filled with the pathos of Jeb Bush’s run to make his family a triumvirate of presidents and the showstopping bluster of Donald Trump’s reality show theatrics, it is Rubio’s story that carries the grand sweep of history. It is a family saga that is both searingly humble and shaped by a cast of larger-than-life characters and epochal moments: Fidel Castro, JFK, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the cocaine wars that inspired Miami Vice, Elián González—even the Bush v. Gore Florida recount.

To get the proper measure of Marco Rubio, it is necessary to understand his complicated relationship with the island of Cuba—its troubled legacy and its wild-card future.

Image OPTICS: Marco's Miami. Longtime local photographer Maggie Steber captured for Politico Magazine the unique city that Rubio's family has called home since they arrived from Cuba in 1956. (Click to view gallery.) | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

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In late September, when Pope Francis addressed Congress, Rubio listened intently. “Millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners because most of us were once foreigners,” the pontiff told the assembled legislators, stepping into one of the most contentious issues of 2016. “I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descendants of immigrants.”

Marco Rubio, born a Catholic, wiped away a tear. That palpable gratitude of an immigrant’s son also spurred Rubio’s rebuke to rival Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump, whose stump speeches are a salad of U.S. failings and failures, sprinkled with nuggets of anti-immigrant nativism. “I think America is great.” Rubio responded emotionally to Bill O’Reilly. “You know how I know it’s great? You don’t have American refugees winding up on the shores of other countries. You have people wanting their children born here!”

People, that is, like Rubio’s parents, Oriales and Mario.

The Rubio family’s timeline, however, is not the traditional Cuban exile one—but rather the dream shared by all immigrants. Years before Fidel Castro emerged from the Sierra Maestra and seized Havana, the Rubios had settled into a better life in America.

Class time | Rubio’s elementary school—where he first fell in love with football and the Miami Dolphins—stood at the heart of the neighborhood’s growing Cuban population. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

The Rubios never had it easy—in the United States or in their homeland. Even by Cuban standards, Rubio’s parents, grandparents and great-grandparents struggled. The childhood pueblos of his grandparents were not glamorous like Havana or Santiago de Cuba but bore names like Jicotea, Cabaiguán and Jatibonico, names derived more from the indigenous language than the imperialist Spanish, places where folks did the killing work of slashing sugarcane and farming tobacco. Even today, one sees bohios—thatched roof huts—and feels the remorseless heat.

The island’s magnificent beaches and soothing coastal breezes feel far from these dusty towns that dot the Carretera Central and the Autopista, Cuba’s two-lane highway that runs along the spine of the crocodile-shaped island from Pinar del Rio to Sancti Spiritus. Motorists drive the unlit Autopista, as I have done more than once, at their own peril, especially at night as bicyclists mix with oxcarts and ancient Russian-made Ladas with headlights dimmer than flashlights.

Rubio’s beloved maternal grandfather and mentor, Pedro Victor Garcia, was one of the few in his hometown who learned to read, since polio had damaged his leg and exempted him from the farm work that occupied his siblings.



Eventually, Pedro Victor and his young wife moved farther east to Jatibonico, Camaguey, a wealthier province known for its stalwart alliance with the Catholic Church and its once bustling cattle industry. He worked for the railroad and later as a lector, reading news and stories to factory workers as they rolled tobacco, keeping the torcedores awake, alert and entertained. Several of his seven daughters were born in Jatibonico, including Oriales, Rubio’s mother, who is known as Oria. At one point, they were “a family of nine living in a one-room house with a dirt floor” in the town of Cabaiguán, Rubio writes.

Rubio’s paternal grandfather, Antonio Rubio, hailed from the western province of Pinar del Rio, known for its verdant tobacco fields. Orphaned as a teen, he found a job working with a Havana cigar factory, but mostly he hawked cookies and coffee as a street vendor. Antonio married and had eight children—Rubio’s father, Mario, being the sixth. On her 42nd birthday, Antonio’s wife died of TB-related pneumonia. At age 8, Mario Rubio had to leave school to help feed his family. “Many nights, my father and his siblings went to bed hungry,” Rubio wrote in his memoir.

Over the years, Rubio has made his extended family saga the central narrative of political campaigns. But, in doing so, he has offered several variants, grappling with which story to tell, and in what order, what to leave unmentioned and what might help his political career.

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Certainly, Rubio’s family fled tyranny in Cuba—a staple in his oft-told narrative. The tyrant in question, however, in May 1956, was not Fidel Castro, but rather dictator Fulgencio Batista. Rubio’s family actually arrived in the United States on a regular commercial flight, joining a small community of fewer than 10,000 Cubans in Miami.

Throughout his rise, Rubio referred to himself, officially and in speeches, as the “son of exiles” whose family had been robbed of their homeland by “a thug named Fidel Castro.” His tellings often left ambiguous when exactly they arrived, as he explained they “lost everything” by coming to the United States. His official Senate biography, in its second sentence, noted that his parents “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover,” which was patently untrue.

In October 2011, the Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia unearthed the family’s naturalization papers, establishing that they had been granted U.S. permanent residency two and a half years before Castro took power. Later, Roig-Franzia expanded on his findings in a biography, The Rise of Marco Rubio. Neither account was welcomed by Rubio, who is unusually thin-skinned even for a Miami politician, and whose campaign team is known for a rapid response pushback against news reports they would rather not see published.

Senator Marco Rubio defended his version of the family’s story: “The real essence of my family’s story is not about the date my parents first entered the United States. Or whether they traveled back and forth between the two nations.” Then he muddied the waters again, continuing, “Or even the date they left Fidel Castro’s Cuba forever and permanently settled here.”

Cuban roots | 1. Marco Rubio’s Cuban-born parents, Oriales and Mario. 2-3. Rubio’s maternal grandparents, Pedro Victor and Dominga Garcia, who moved with the family to the United States in 1956. 4. Marco Rubio’s parents, center, on their wedding day in Havana in 1949. 5. Mario Rubio working as a bartender. 6. Rubio’s family arrives in Havana in 1960, 11 years before Marco was born, on a trip to see if they could move back to their homeland. | Sen. Marco Rubio; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

But to Cuban exiles who fled Castro, the date does matter. Virtually every exile can spit out the exact day that they fled Cuba as quickly as their own birthday. Those who left after the Castros seized power share a rite of passage, and few in Miami, including some of Rubio’s most ardent supporters, believe Rubio’s rebuttal that “my family’s story is not about the date” or that he innocently confused the year of his parents’ arrival.

“I don’t buy that and no one buys that,” says Alfredo Jose Estrada, editor of Latino magazine. “We know when we left and why. To the day and to the minute and what we took with us and what fit into that suitcase. It’s part of the Cuban exile mythology. It defines us as Cuban exiles. My father’s story—standing on line at the airport in Havana is burned into my brain, just a few weeks before Bay of Pigs.”

“I will never forget that date,” says Miami Dade Commissioner Rebeca Sosa, Rubio’s political godmother. “We know to the day and the reason. My father was in prison until they let him out one night in 1964. We fled a year later.”

Broad church | The faith Rubio learned at St. Raymond Catholic Church, where he once attended weekly Saturday mass, has been a constant part of the politician’s life, even during chapters as a Mormon and a Baptist. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

Those who came before the Castros, like Senator Bob Menendez’s family and the Rubios, are not members of this particular club—which doesn’t mean that their anti-Castroism is any less heartfelt.

While he corrected his Senate website, Rubio still sometimes makes ambiguous statements about his family’s Cuban roots. At the second GOP debate this fall, Rubio described his grandfather as someone who “came to this country in the 1960s … escaping Cuba. And he lived with us—growing up.” But he left out the rest of the story.

Rubio likely was not anxious to share the fact that his maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, who had lived with the family in Miami since 1956, returned to Havana two weeks after Castro took power and landed a good job at the Treasury Ministry. Nor was Rubio eager for it to be known that his mother made at least four trips to Cuba post-Castro to assess moving back home and to attend to her father’s health. This is not to say that the Rubio family were pro-Castro; quite likely, as with many Cubans, they were hopeful that the overthrow of the obscenely corrupt Batista meant a better life. But like many of their countrymen—including the roughly 2 million who have fled the island since 1959—they came to believe that life in Cuba would get only worse.



Pedro Victor did leave for Miami again in the summer of 1962, where he became mired in a long immigration process, files ferreted out by Roig-Franzia, owing to suspicions of U.S. authorities as to why he returned to Cuba in the first place. Ignoring a deportation order (as many undocumented immigrants do today), Pedro Victor simply stayed in the United States and was eventually able to become a permanent resident in 1967, following the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act.

Like many Cuban-Americans, Pedro Victor, “Papá,” as he was known to Rubio and his family, had been an avowed Democrat—only to be devastated when John F. Kennedy undercut the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 by withholding U.S. air power. That “betrayal,” believed by exiles to have cost them the return of their homeland, led them into the arms of the GOP—a mass defection that would haunt Democratic presidential prospects for decades.

“When I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba, [Papá] narrated the life of José Marti and the heroics of the Mambises, who had won Cuba’s independence,” Rubio recalled in his 2012 memoir, a book written with Senator John McCain’s ghostwriter Mark Salter.

Rubio’s rewriting of his family story is telling and, even politically, understandable. By 1990, when Rubio caught the bug for politics, Cuban exiles had transformed from being those “yearning to breathe free” to being the indisputable power players of Miami-Dade, Florida’s most-populous county—dominating not only elections at every level, but also businesses from real estate development to government contracts. “The Cubans built Miami,” explains Salvador Lew, a former head of Radio Marti. “The Jews built Miami Beach,” adding with a laugh, “And the Jubans [Cuban Jews] did both!”

While cubanidad—one’s Cuban identity in the diaspora—was the main entrée card to Miami’s political elite, it was far better to have arrived post-Castro and thus be able to call oneself a Cuban exile, as opposed to being merely an immigrant. El exilio historico denoted being in the first wave of post-Castro arrivals, a group that generally was wealthier and whiter than those who came later, and implied an iron-fisted hard line when it came to la lucha against Fidel and Raul Castro. Its very identity rested upon being political and ideological refugees, not economic ones. And from this distinction arose a panoply of privileges, including a unique and unprecedented immigration policy known informally as “The Cuban Exception.”

By 1980, exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the Cuban American National Foundation, had become a national political power broker working closely with President Ronald Reagan, who created Radio and TV Marti with his insistent urging. Cuban exiles were no longer just calling the shots in Miami; they were players in the White House and in the National Security Council—with a lobbying arm that rivaled, indeed was modeled on, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In the years since, Cuban exiles have been the most successful Hispanic force in U.S. politics: All three of the Hispanics in the U.S. Senate today are Cuban-American: Rubio, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez and Texas Republican Ted Cruz, whose father was Cuban-born. In fact, since 1976, four of the five Hispanics elected to the U.S. Senate have been Cuban-Americans.

On Calle Ocho | As a boy, Rubio hung out at the nearby Domino Park—a favorite attraction of children and the elderly, chess players and cigar smokers, and a central part of Little Havana social life. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

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By the time Marco Antonio Rubio was born in May 1971, his parents’ fortunes in the United States had improved. They bought a small home in Coral Gate, a community just west of Miami’s Little Havana. When Rubio was 5, his father sold the home, having scored a job as building manager at the Toledo Plaza apartment complex not far from Miami’s airport, and with it, a free ground-floor apartment. Rubio attended Henry M. Flagler Elementary, a school with a burgeoning Cuban-American student body. Later, the family moved to Hialeah, an enclave so thoroughly Cuban-American that English is effectively a second language.

As the so-called Cuban Miracle of Miami unfolded around them, Rubio lived within a cocoon of family and friends who spoke Spanish exclusively at home—where the radio was invariably tuned to shock jock emisoras on stations like Radio Mambi, La Ponderosa or La Cubanisima in a 24/7 denunciation of Fidel Castro.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Cuban-Americans backed Republicans, but Rubio’s politics weren’t entirely a straight line. Over the six years that the family lived in Nevada during Marco’s youth, both parents worked in unionized hotels. When the Culinary Workers Union went on strike at his father’s hotel in 1984, Rubio became a radical almost overnight. Marching with his father on picket lines for weeks, he wrote that he “became a committed union activist,” even dissing his father when he went back to work because the family was dead broke.

By 1990, though, Rubio was firmly ensconced in the GOP, having landed a summer internship with freshman Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban-American elected to Congress. In 1992, an intrepid 21-year-old Rubio called the office of Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the scion of a politically prominent Cuban family, and asked to volunteer in the state senator’s first congressional campaign. “I spent the entire summer,” Rubio wrote, “learning Miami politics from the ground up.”

Sun-kissed | Today, the beautiful beach outside is all that remains of what was once the glitzy and celebrity-filled Roney Plaza Hotel, where Mario Rubio, Marco’s father, worked in the late 1950s. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

After a year playing football at Tarkio College in Missouri, Rubio later graduated from the University of Florida and, in 1996, from the University of Miami School of Law—his admittance facilitated by recommendations from Ros-Lehtinen and Diaz-Balart. After law school, his first job was at a firm run by Al Cardenas, another Cuban-born kingmaker and longtime ally of the Bush family.

From the start, Rubio made crucial alliances with politically powerful Cuban exiles. Rubio scored his first electoral victory in 1998, a seat on the West Miami City Commission, with a game-changing assist from a local power broker, Mayor Rebeca Sosa. Sosa, today a commissioner with Miami-Dade County, pointed out that she had been born in Camaguey, the same province as Rubio’s mother, Oria. “I first met Oria, who was always active in the [West Miami] community at meetings here,” Sosa tells me. “Then her son Marco introduced himself to me. I knew from the start that he was ready for bigger things.”



Two years later, having astutely worked Miami’s Cuban politics, Rubio was seated in the Florida House, representing a lopsided district that included blue-collar Cuban Hialeah, the largely African-American and Dominican neighborhood of Allapattah and tony Coral Gables.

That same year, Jeb Bush assumed office as governor, marking the first time since Reconstruction that the GOP controlled the governor’s mansion, the Florida House and its Senate. “At that point, Jeb Bush was a god,” says Dan Gelber, who served eight years in the Florida House, including as the Democratic leader, working amicably with Rubio. And Rubio, Gelber says, went from “being a foot soldier for Jeb Bush to becoming a lieutenant in Jeb’s army.”

The Rubio-Jeb pecking order of those years is something Bush has been making clear of late. “Marco was a member of the House of Representatives when I was governor,” Bush pointedly remarked in early October, as his mentee passed him in the polls, “and he followed my lead.”

These days, Gelber says he thinks of Jeb Bush not only as Rubio’s political commander-in-chief but what he calls a “frenenmentor—friend, enemy and mentor.”

Carlos Saladrigas, a former card-carrying member of el exilio historico who hails from an eminent family in pre-Castro Cuba, first encountered Rubio at a luncheon for Republican businessmen when he was in the Florida House. “He wanted to be speaker of the House back then,” Saladrigas recounts. “At lunch, he gave everyone a small bound black book and told us to write down our ideas for government and what he should do in Tallahassee—and then we gave them to him. I thought it was gimmicky, but by the same token, I was impressed by his openness and his willingness to reach out…. I liked him.”

Gelber said that despite “disagreeing about just about everything,” he found Rubio to be fair and courteous. In 2002, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart chaired the body’s redistricting committee, with his friend Rubio serving on the committee. The duo proved to possess an Olympian talent for redistricting—producing a map known as one of the most contentiously gerrymandered and litigated in Florida history. “That map set the gold standard model for gerrymander abuse,” says Gelber, but it was one that Diaz-Balart and Rubio used to amplify the districts and power of the GOP and notably Cuban-Americans like themselves, usher in new compatriot legislators, including Rubio’s friend, David Rivera, while solidifying the districts of other exiles, like ally Ralph Arza.

In September 2005, Governor Bush presented Rubio with a ceremonial sword, anointing him the next speaker of the House—its first Cuban-American.

In 2010, Rubio vanquished the odds-on favorite, former Governor Charlie Crist, for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Republican Mel Martinez, an exile who had come to Florida in 1962 as part of the Catholic Church’s Operation Pedro Pan, which had helped 14,000 unaccompanied minors flee Castro. That November, Rubio was swept across the finish line by a surging Tea Party, the Cuban-American vote and some creative and shrewd politicking of his own: He helped boost the campaign of Democrat Kendrick Meek, who split the vote with Crist, who was running as an independent.

Home base (left) | The Corona Plaza apartment complex in West Miami—formerly the Toledo Plaza, which Mario Rubio managed and where the family lived—today remains an early stop for immigrants. Art deco (right) | The only trace of the Sans Souci Hotel of Rubio’s youth—where his father worked for five years as he tried to gain citizenship—now hangs in the lobby of a new ritzier upstart, Hotel Riu Plaza. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

Often by his side was Rivera, whom Rubio credits in his memoir as “among my closest friends and advisers.” And for many years, the two men, who met as volunteers on the 1992 Diaz-Balart campaign, seemed to rise together arm-in-arm. Rivera brought Rubio on to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, and Rubio later helped Rivera win election to the Florida House in 2002; the two men worked hand-in-glove at the state level, with Rivera playing a mix of Rubio’s Falstaff—a fun, party guy who pushed the limits—and his political enforcer. The two even shared a house in Tallahassee—and later one in Washington. “I saw them as a bad boy-good boy team,” says Christian Ulvert, who managed Gelber’s campaign for attorney general. “David was 100 percent bad boy, and Marco Rubio seemed like his opposite.”

When Rubio was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, Rivera won a congressional seat. But Rivera’s career ended abruptly after he was implicated in a “ringer” scandal—financing a fake candidate to run against his opponent to siphon off votes. Amid a raft of alleged campaign infractions, Melanie Sloan, executive director of the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, declaimed that “Rivera might very well be the most corrupt member of Congress.”

Rivera, for his part, has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged, though the investigation is ongoing. Earlier this year, he was ordered to pay nearly $60,000 to settle an unrelated ethics complaint stemming from his time as a legislator.

Rubio has consistently stood by Rivera, saying, “He’s a friend, and I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.” Pressed by Fox News in 2012 over the relationship, the senator dug in his heels over the friendship, explaining, “Maybe it’s acceptable [in Washington]—it isn’t to me—to turn your back on friends when they’re going through a difficult time, no matter, you know, what they may have done or not done.”

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Rubio speaks of still living in “the same working-class neighborhood” of West Miami where he grew up. Then and now, West Miami has its share of strip malls and bodegas and places to buy guayaberas, the traditional long-sleeve shirt favored by Cubans. And it’s still the place to find delicious guarapo, made from sugarcane, and fried, sugar-coated churros, which are a favorite at La Palma. For many seniors, Spanish is the only language spoken. Its northern boundary is Calle Ocho, aka SW Eighth Street, which farther east becomes the main drag of Little Havana, where generations of Cuban exiles have marched to protest repression in their homeland.

Oria Rubio has lived in the same house since the mid-1980s, when the family returned from Nevada, a decidedly modest beige stucco home with aluminum windows and a narrow paved front yard. Oria shares the house with Rubio’s older sister Barbara, and her husband, Orlando Cicilia.



Rubio, who was called Tony by his parents—short for his middle name, Antonio—does live about five blocks from his 85-year-old mother, but the home that Rubio shares with his wife, Jeanette Dousdebes-Rubio, and their four children is unmistakably at the higher end of upper middle class. Their 2,700-square-foot house at the end of a cul de sac boasts four bedrooms, 3.5 baths, an in-ground swimming pool, tall, grand windows and well-tended gardens. A brick inlaid driveway holds the family’s luxury SUV and Rubio’s favorite pickup truck, a slate-gray Ford.

A sign outside the house reads “Christ Fellowship,” a reference to an activist evangelical church that was formerly First Baptist of Perrine, led by a charismatic pastor, Rick Blackwood. His wife, introduced to the church by Rubio’s sister Veronica, is deeply involved with Christ Fellowship and sometimes hosts Bible classes, and Rubio credits Christ Fellowship and Blackwood with reinvigorating his family’s faith and infusing the Catholic liturgy with meaning for him.

Certainly, Rubio has been an unusual pilgrim: beginning life as a Catholic, converting to Mormonism during the six years his family lived in Nevada, then returning to the Catholic Church. He regularly attends Catholic services and attends some Baptist services as well.

Born to Colombian parents, Dousdebes-Rubio grew up in South Miami, a more prosperous neighborhood, and met her future husband at a West Miami park when she was 17 and he was 19. Later, she secured a coveted spot as a cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins, a team worshipped in Miami, including by her notably football fanatic husband. She was even showcased in the squad’s first swimsuit calendar. She took some classes but skipped getting a college degree and later worked as a bank teller.

The couple married in 1998 at the Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables, where the Catholic congregation is primarily well-to-do Hispanics. (At the reception, however, it was not the handsome couple who drew all the attention but the Latin film star and singer Carlos Ponce, who was then married to Rubio’s younger sister, Veronica.)

Dousdebes-Rubio has been the at-home parent for their four children—Amanda, Daniella, Anthony and Dominick, ages 7 to 15. She also works part-time with the Braman Family Foundation, established by Rubio’s longtime benefactor, auto tycoon Norman Braman, who has been rumored to have pledged as much as $10 million-plus to Rubio’s super PAC for the 2016 race.

***

The friendly sun-kissed Miami the Rubio family found when they first arrived in 1956 had transformed by the 1980s into a murderous battleground for competing cocaine cartels. In 1987, two years after their return from Las Vegas, the drug war brutally sideswiped the family. By then, Rubio was a junior at South Miami Senior High School, just off Cobra Lane. He was an indifferent student, but he was passionate about football and the school’s championship team, the Cobras. The school’s roof, then and now, sprouts an immense snakehead.

It had to be a miserable irony when the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration dubbed the biggest drug bust of 1987 “Operation Cobra.” The case targeted the notorious thug Mario Tabraue—rumored to be the role model for Al Pacino’s Scarface and an inspiration for the hit TV show Miami Vice. At his heavily guarded, garish mansion in Coconut Grove, Tabraue kept four rattlesnakes, five monkeys, two cheetahs, six cobras, a toucan and his prized two-headed python.

“Mario Tabraue was a sinister individual who would have you killed simply for looking at him the wrong way,” recalls retired Miami-Dade detective Luis Rodriguez. Officials alleged that Tabraue ran the smuggling operation with his father, Guillermo, a Bay of Pigs veteran. Along with being charged with selling more than $75 million in cocaine and marijuana, the Tabraues were implicated in the murder and the chainsaw dismemberment of a federal informant.

Also arrested in the sweep of a half-dozen narcotics smugglers was Orlando Cicilia, the husband of Rubio’s sister Barbara. Cicilia’s role, according to the feds, consisted of aggressively moving the drugs around the country, including to Hawaii, reportedly earning $15 million. “Mario was one of the original Cocaine Cowboys,” recalls Raul Diaz, a former Miami detective who headed the task force charged with closing down the cartels in South Florida. “I started watching Tabraue around 1977, and Orlando was close to him.”

In step | The marching band rehearses outside South Miami Senior High School, where Rubio was once teased that he was too American. The school’s Cobra mascot looms overhead. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

Cicilia’s arrest and imprisonment traumatized the extended Rubio family. After the government seized Cicilia’s house, a pregnant and grief-stricken Barbara Cicilia moved back to her parents’ home—reduced to sleeping on the family’s fold-out sofa. Orlando had been a big part of their family—Marco had been close to him since he was 5 years old, according to his memoir, and he married Barbara when Rubio was only 9 years old.

Mario Tabraue was sentenced to 100 years, but after some helpful informing (“he sang long and loud,” Diaz says) was out after 12 years. Because of the vagaries of the U.S. justice system, Rubio’s brother-in-law, Orlando, ended up doing similar time—12 years—in prison, from 1989 through 2000, even though he was a second-tier player.

After his release, Cicilia moved into the Rubio family home. He is listed on the house as a co-owner with Oria Rubio. (The Cicilias’ son, who also is named Orlando, has worked on several Rubio campaigns and was the real estate agent on Rubio’s house.)

In 2006, when Rubio was made speaker of Florida’s House, Orlando Cicilia joined him and the rest of the family onstage, as he did again at Rubio’s Senate victory celebration in 2010. Despite these public appearances, Rubio had never mentioned his brother-in-law’s criminal past.

In fact, it was not generally known until Gerardo Reyes, an Emmy Award-winning Miami reporter who heads the investigative unit at Univision, reported the story in July 2011.



Reyes says he accidentally came upon the Cicilia case while doing a profile on Rubio. Reyes requested all files on Cicilia at the Miami federal courthouse, and about a month later, the clerk told him the box had arrived. However, there were large gaps in the files. Missing was documentation about Cicilia’s parole hearings, such as who testified or sent letters of reference on the inmate’s behalf and what role, if any Marco Rubio or others may have played.

According to Reyes, when he phoned the Rubio-Cicilia home, Barbara Cicilia denied that her husband had ever been convicted on narcotics charges, then hung up. Matters devolved from there. Within 40 minutes, Rubio’s communications team went on the offense, launching a ferocious lobbying assault to kill the story. Later, Rubio, who derided the story as “a cheap shot” and “old news,” declared war on Univision, a saga minutely recounted in the New Yorker and the Columbia Journalism Review in 2012.

Rubio’s old friend David Rivera, then a congressman, led the scorched earth assault on the network, its journalists and its executives. Rivera, with two other Florida political allies of Rubio, wrote an open letter saying Univision’s news division was guilty of “extortion,” arguing that the story on Cicilia was merely payback because Rubio refused to be interviewed by the network’s star, Jorge Ramos. Moreover, Rivera and the allies asked Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to push Univision for an official apology and the dismissal of Isaac Lee as head of the news division.

The efforts bore fruit, persuading GOP candidates to boycott Univision’s long-scheduled 2012 Republican presidential debate. However, “[Rubio’s team] were stunned that Gerardo was not fired and the story not killed,” says one veteran Miami reporter, who requested anonymity as he continues to cover the campaign. “They were really shocked that Univision didn’t roll over.”

As a result of Team Rubio’s lobbying, the GOP instead gifted their 2012 debate to Univision’s much-smaller and fierce rival, Telemundo, where the debate moderator was Jose Diaz-Balart, a talented reporter who also happens to be the brother of former Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Rubio’s close friends and allies.

The Univision fight was consistent with the brawling nature of Team Rubio, which is zealously protective of the senator, and reminiscent of a similar take-no-prisoners war and media boycott in 1992 led by exile czar Jorge Mas Canosa, the political godfather of many exile politicians. To retaliate for what Mas felt was insufficient respect for him and la comunidad, Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald vending machines were defaced with red paint—and worse. Bilingual billboards and stickers reading Yo No Creo en el Herald (I Don’t Believe the Herald) were plastered about the city.

Two decades later, Rubio’s running war with the communications giant has left many scratching their heads. Univision, based in Miami, was once the bully pulpit and press organ for Cuban-American politicians—Rubio himself was once a paid commentator—but the network’s focus has shifted in recent years to, it says, better represent the broader Hispanic community. By 2011, it often topped the four major networks in ratings; today, it represents the station of choice for two-thirds of all Hispanics, a group where the GOP is keen to make inroads.

Wedding bells | Marco Rubio married Jeanette Dousdebes at the Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables in October 1998. He proposed atop the Empire State Building, inspired by her favorite movie, Sleepless in Seattle. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

As the Rubio-Univision feud reached its apex, GOP strategist Steve Schmidt lamented to the New Yorker that Rubio’s boycott of the major network was “a profoundly shortsighted decision that ignores the changing demographics of the country. It’s on the verge of insanity. Marco Rubio has a legitimate grievance, but the long-term interests of the Republican Party supersede the grievances of a U.S. senator.”

The battle continues to this day with intermittent salvos. “It’s Marco’s pride,” says a Nicaraguan acquaintance of Rubio. “He carries a grudge. It’s a Cuban thing.” The sparring continued on air when Rubio reluctantly agreed to an interview in June 2012 with the network’s star anchor Jorge Ramos, who has been dubbed the Hispanic Walter Cronkite. (Ramos’ advocacy for the DREAM Act prompted media fireworks this summer at a Donald Trump news conference when the bellicose billionaire had Ramos tossed out of the room.)

The Rubio campaign continues to characterize Univision as a network with a far-left liberal agenda. At the second GOP debate, Rubio jested that he spoke Spanish to certain audiences to spare them from relying on “a translator from Univision.” The Mexican-born Ramos, meanwhile, has also criticized Rubio, telling the New Yorker this fall, “Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz won’t defend the undocumented.”

Team Rubio’s war, however, evidently chastened the powerful network to a degree. Not surprisingly, there was considerable interest within the news division in investigating why the Orlando Cicilia box of documents was missing so many files—rumors about the documents have circulated in Washington and Miami in the years since­. “But they didn’t do it,” says a source close to the network. “There was a feeling that maybe [the network] didn’t want to go through all that again. Even though it’s a great story to find out where the files are—and what was in them.”

According to never-before-reported documents shown to Politico, federal case files related to Orlando Cicilia’s narcotics conviction were destroyed three days before the court acted on the Univision request for them in July 2011. A spokesperson for the federal courts said the documents were “destroyed in accordance with the record schedule,” and that it was just a coincidental “matter of timing” that Univision was pursuing the story. Reyes first made the request in person at the courthouse a month earlier, in June. According to internal memos at Univision, obtained by Politico, court clerks in Miami and at the Federal Records Center in Atlanta told the network that the destruction happened after that request was made.

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The ongoing sniping with Univision is just one part of Rubio’s rocky connection with Hispanics in the U.S., 97 percent of whom are Central or Latin-American. Navigating the new politics of Cuba and the equally fraught politics of immigration promises to be a thorny challenge for Rubio—even as he seems uniquely positioned to appeal to Latino voters.



Today, Florida, increasingly a must-win state for the GOP in presidential elections, is far different than it was 20 years ago, when Rubio entered politics. The state has the nation’s third-largest Hispanic population, but it’s one that increasingly doesn’t look like—or agree with—Rubio. Increasing numbers of Central and Latin Americans are chipping away at the Cuban-American monopoly on electoral power. In 2012, President Barack Obama set a record for Democratic presidential contenders, winning about half of Florida’s Cuban-American vote and 71 percent of the overall Hispanic vote.

Cuban-American views have also softened, and today, a bare majority—51 percent—support the Obama administration’s normalization with their ancestral homeland. “This new generation identifies with being American, not Cuban,” says Nelson Diaz, 37, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party, who is personally backing Rubio. “The exilio historico are dying out and their grandchildren want to visit Cuba.”

Consuelo Fernandez Menocal is the great-granddaughter of the third president of Cuba, Mario García Menocal, a general in the War of Independence, and comes from a family that have been full-throated members of el exilio historico. But she says she’s buried the hatchet. “I’m done with all that,” says Menocal, an interior designer in Miami. She has been to the island twice in recent years, even visiting several of the family’s grand properties confiscated by the government. As she says, “We have to move on.”

Many exiles are now hopeful, realistically or not, that rapprochement will lead to reforms. In September, Modesto “Mitch” Maidique, a hard-liner and a former president of Florida International University, penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald, exhorting exiles to be respectful of those with opposing opinions about Cuba—notably those favoring normalization.

For many Cuban-Americans, the shift began with the saga of Elián González, the shipwrecked Cuban boy who was picked up off the Florida shore in 1999 and sparked a seven-month international custody battle between the Miami family and the boy’s father in Cuba. Carlos Saladrigas was in the González house in 2000, among those seeking to negotiate a peaceful conclusion, when heavily armed federal agents sent by Attorney General Janet Reno arrived and took the boy. For Saladrigas, he says, the Elián affair was the beginning of “a very slow process of reflection about my views on Cuba.”

For the exile leadership, however, the removal of “the miracle child” González was the clarion call to demand punishment against the Democrats. Retribution was paid out during the Bush-Gore recount, in which hard-liners played a dominant role in seeing that George W. Bush carried Florida.

Even as his community’s views shift and moderate, Rubio has dug in his heels—refusing to compromise what he sees as the moral high ground for political expediency. Rubio, Ros-Lehtinen and Diaz-Balart emphatically reject any normalization with Cuba. Indeed, the Castros continue their aggressive repression, holding hundreds of political prisoners, and detaining or arresting 900 so-called dissidents in the weeks leading up to Pope Francis’ visit there in September. “President Obama’s eagerness to please the Castro regime knows no bounds,” declared Rubio, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “as he keeps offering one-sided concessions that will strengthen the brutal dictatorship at the expense of the Cuban people.”

Miami boy | 1. Marco Rubio and his father outside his parents’ first home in Miami in 1972. 2-3. Rubio’s school portraits in sixth grade and high school. 4. Rubio in 1982 at a youth football conference, in Las Vegas, where the Rubio family lived for six years. 5. Rubio, his parents and his new wife, Jeanette, on the couple’s wedding day in Florida in 1998. 6. Rubio in high school. 7. The Rubios holding their oldest child, Amanda, in 2000. | Sen. Marco Rubio

Should Obama nominate an ambassador to Cuba, Rubio has promised to block it and to do all within his power to keep the U.S. embargo in place. It’s a view that increasingly isolates him from the business and libertarian wings of the GOP. Rubio’s conservative ally Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson recently visited Cuba and is among those in the party who see ending the U.S. embargo as a huge economic opportunity to boost what is already a $300-million-a-year export market.

Immigration is an even trickier issue for Rubio, separating him from the broader Hispanic population in the U.S. Nationally, about 17 percent of the country is Hispanic—a percentage that’s likely to rise to nearly a third in the coming decades. It is a population that is generally less affluent than that of Cuban-Americans and one that decidedly favors the Democratic Party.

Rubio’s policy stances on immigration remain at odds with the views of the overwhelming majority of Hispanics. From the start, Rubio has had a hesitant, equivocating relationship with immigration reform—reflecting both the welcome arms that met his immigrant family and the nativist right-wing impulses of his own party. In the Florida House, he backed a bill with some elements of the DREAM Act. He also made sure as speaker that an array of draconian anti-immigrant proposals never saw the light of day for a vote.

During his 2010 Senate run, as the Tea Party’s influence rose in the GOP, he came out against the DREAM Act, but about a year later, he was a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, the bipartisan group in Congress backing broad, comprehensive immigration reform that included a version of the act. Then, after experiencing excoriating blowback from his party’s conservative base, he reversed himself, then went to radio silence on the issue.

Pressed by Sean Hannity during a September interview, Rubio demurred on his own plan. “The first two things you have to do is stop illegal immigration. Then second you have to modernize our legal immigration system, and then third you can have a debate about how to even legalize people to begin with,” Rubio told the Fox News host. “And then, ultimately in 10 or 12 years, you could have a broader debate about how has this worked out and should we allow some of them to apply for green cards and eventually citizenship.” Critics immediately pounced that Rubio was ruling out a path to citizenship during his second term, should he be elected.

Unspoken and unquestioned in the immigration debate is that rarest of political anomalies, the Republican Party’s unwavering support of blanket amnesty for one immigrant group: Cubans.



Rubio has not publicly objected to the privileges afforded his brethren by the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which grants any Cuban arriving in the United States a host of benefits including immediate eligibility for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid and other federal assistance. After just one year, Cubans can apply for lawful permanent residency and then citizenship. Moreover, the “Wet Foot/Dry Foot” policy of 1995 allows any Cuban who steps on U.S. territory to be qualified and welcomed. No other immigrant group in the history of the United States since the Civil War has enjoyed such privileges.

Being a second-generation white Cuban-American also places Rubio outside the Hispanic mainstream. Though rarely discussed, there is not much love lost between Cuban-Americans and other Central or Latin Americans who resent the special treatment afforded Cubans by the U.S. government. Privately, even publicly, some Hispanics do not even regard white Cubans as being gente como uno—one of us—and vice versa.

Rubio’s abandonment of the DREAM Act led one advocacy group in 2012 to sponsor a commercial on Spanish-language TV that ended with a punning riposte on his surname: “No Somos Rubios”—meaning “we are not Rubios” but also, more pointedly, targeting racial and ethnic differences, meaning “we are not blonds” and “we are not whites.”

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Founded in 1971, the Latin Business Association has driven much of Miami’s development. During the building boom of the 1980s and 1990s, it boasted about a thousand members “and nothing got built without them,” says Salvador Lew. “If you want to do business in the city of

Miami-Dade you need to be involved with the LBA,” one financial executive told me.

The LBA’s 35th anniversary gala in late September, held in the Hilton Miami’s ballroom, gathered a who’s who of Florida politicians and movers and shakers. Before Governor Rick Scott gave the event’s keynote, Lieutenant Governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera methodically worked the Hilton ballroom, seeking endorsements and cash for his bid to succeed his pal as senator in 2016. Rubio has announced he will not seek a second term. Win or lose his presidential bid, Rubio’s moving on.

When I ask Scott whom he is backing in the GOP presidential field, he grins gamely. “Well, I love all Republicans, of course, but I have a real conundrum here,” he says, holding up his hand with fingers spread. “We have five GOP presidential candidates who are from Florida.”

Power lunch | West Miami’s mayor sent a young Rubio to Hialeah’s Tropical Restaurant to meet Cuban-American businessmen as he started his first campaign for Florida legislature. It worked: Regino Rodriguez, center, the owner for the past 33 years, is now a strong Rubio supporter. | Maggie Steber for Politico Magazine/Redux Pictures

Noting my puzzlement, he runs down the list: “We have Jeb, who lives in Coral Gables,” he explains. “And we have Marco Rubio in West Miami. And there’s Donald Trump [a part-time resident] in Palm Beach, and Mike Huckabee, he actually has a home in Destin [a coastal town in the Panhandle], and Ben Carson lives somewhere, I forgot where [West Palm Beach, as it turns out]. So we got five Floridians!”

Scott’s coy answer obscures the reality that the GOP race has come down to a wrenching choice between its two favorite sons whose ambitions have divided South Florida. Jeb Bush and his Mexican-born wife, Columba, live just 10 minutes from the Rubios in a townhouse in Coral Gables and worship in the church where Rubio was married, as well as the somewhat tonier Church of the Epiphany.

For years, the two Florida politicians were in lockstep in seeking the toughest of sanctions against Cuba. It has been GOP loyalty and his hard line with the Castros that has won Jeb, long considered an “honorary Cuban” in many quarters of Little Havana, the endorsement of the exile establishment—including some of Rubio’s own allies and mentors, like Ros-Lehtinen, Diaz-Balart and Representative Carlos Curbelo. (Miami-Dade County Commissioner Sosa was one of the few to come out early for Rubio.)

Also backing Bush is Al Cardenas, 67, one of the kingmakers in exile GOP politics, who served three terms as chair or vice-chair of the Florida Republican Party and was an early mentor to Rubio, hiring the young lawyer at his law firm. “Marco was a bright young man,” Cardenas says, but, “at a time when no Cuban-Americans had been elected, Jeb was our ambassador. Jeb was our ombudsman with Washington from early on. People don’t forget that. He’s had three decades of continuous service to Cuban-Americans. You could say that anyone in office in Florida today from their 30s to their 60s has a debt to Jeb Bush.”

It appears that the two men are destined to collide during the state’s delegate-rich, winner-take-all primary in March. They’ve already been competing in the state’s wealthier enclaves for donors; Rubio has also run small-dollar fundraising drives to encourage donations of $3.05, a nod to Miami’s area code, 305.

As Rubio’s poll numbers have risen this fall, Bush—whose poll numbers have been going the other direction—has begun taking swipes at his former colleague and has even compared him to Barack Obama, another fresh-faced one-term U.S. senator when he ran for the White House. (“Look, we had a president who came in and said the same kind of thing—new and improved, hope and change—and he didn’t have the leadership skills to fix things,” Bush said in a September CNN interview.)

Old and new | Cuban-American Rodolfo Lopez Perez sits outside Tropical Restaurant, a popular hangout in a heavily Cuban-American neighborhood, as young Miami businessmen pass by with their takeout lunch.

Even as the Florida GOP establishment leans toward Jeb Bush, at the LBA gala, the political views of its president, builder Guillermo “Willy” Fernandez, are more the crowd’s currency: Fernandez tells me that he’s personally backing Marco Rubio for the nomination.

Similarly, lobbyist Jorge Luis Lopez, who has backed Bush throughout his career, is one of those who has switched dance partners to Rubio. “I consider myself a Jeb Republican, and I was a pioneer for W,” he tells me. “But blood is thicker than politics.”

And then there’s the recent straddling of Florida strategist and CNN pundit Ana Navarro, who has long been aligned with Bush. For months she had herself introduced as “a Jeb Bush backer.” In late September that changed: These days, Navarro is “backing Jeb Bush and is a close friend of Marco Rubio.”