A grandfather’s influence

Cuba is personal for Rubio. His parents were born there, and his grandfather — the single greatest influence on his political thinking — despised what Fidel Castro did to his homeland. In his memoir, Rubio wrote that as a child, “I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba.”

He would sit at the feet of his grandfather, a Ronald Reagan-loving, cigar-smoking shoemaker named Pedro Victor Garcia, and listen to him describe how communism destroyed lives in Cuba and how the United States had a unique role to play in the world as the enforcer of freedom.

Papá, as he called him, spoke to Rubio with reverence for Reagan’s strength and reach, including his controversial funding of the contra rebels fighting the leftist government in Nicaragua. In fifth grade, Rubio wrote a paper praising Reagan for restoring the U.S. military. His grandfather kept it in old red suitcase, a little treasure the senator found a few years ago.

“He was a huge influence on me,” Rubio said in a phone interview with The Washington Post while campaigning in New Hampshire. “He felt that more countries would become like Cuba if America wasn’t the strongest country in the world. So that was instilled in me from an early age.”

Today, Rubio often echoes his grandfather when he talks about his support for the use of U.S. military might and his belief in “American exceptionalism.”

Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), who also serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Rubio believes it is crucial that other countries “know how tough you are and how willing you are to use [force]. And if either of those are gone, you got a problem.”

Risch said that Rubio is a leader in the Senate on foreign affairs and that his knowledge and interest in the world stems from growing up in Miami, where what is happening in Latin America is considered local news.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who is also Cuban American and shares Rubio’s hard line on Cuba, said everyone is informed by the people who surround them. In Rubio’s case, it is not just that Rubio comes from a state with more than 1 million people of Cuban descent but also that many of those he talks to “fled modern-day oppression.”

In West Miami, where Rubio first got elected as a city commissioner at the age of 26 — and where he still lives — he is surrounded by Cuban immigrants and their children. They were the donors and supporters who helped put him in the statehouse and who piled into a chartered flight to Tallahassee to witness him becoming the first Cuban American elected as speaker of the House in Florida. Last year, in a symbolic gesture, Rubio announced his run for president in front of Miami’s Freedom Tower, where the U.S. government once processed Cuban immigrants fleeing the Castro regime.