Though for years I’d bemoaned the fact that my parents were largely one-issue voters, I embraced this once Mr. Trump locked down the nomination. I urged them to please vote for one reason: to prevent a man who started his campaign with strong anti-Latino talk and whose supporters put out a robocall saying “Don’t vote for a Cuban” from winning the presidency. This was before we knew for sure whom I’d have to beg them to vote for.

Brave is the daughter who tries to persuade her Cuban mother to vote for a Clinton. “I can’t vote for that man’s wife,” my mother told me over the phone after the Democratic National Convention. She then announced that she wouldn’t be voting in November at all. Many Cuban-Americans, my parents included, hate Bill Clinton for several reasons, the most relevant one in this instance being that he was president when the Elián González saga occurred.

In their minds, the Clinton administration is solely to blame for the decision to send Elián — a young boy whose mother drowned as she fled Cuba with him in late 1999 — back to the island to live with his father in June 2000. Many speculate that it cost Al Gore the election, which of course hinged on Florida. In March 2000, Mayor Alex Penelas described Mr. Gore’s connection to the decisions on Elián as “guilt by association” and warned that Miami’s Cuban population would hold the Clinton administration responsible should the boy be sent back. He may have been right: 81 percent of the Cubans in Florida voted for George W. Bush in 2000, a higher percentage than had gone Republican in 1996.

In December of that year, during my annual checkup while I was home from college, my doctor — a Cuban man then in his early 50s — showed me a framed photo of a banner he and other men had hung off a Miami expressway overpass. It read: “Thank you, Elián. We Remembered in November.”

Historically, much of the animosity toward Democrats originated with the Kennedy administration. From a young age, I was told story after story about how John F. Kennedy had botched the Bay of Pigs invasion. This blame translated into a general distrust of the Democratic Party — a feeling that was beginning to fade with voters my parents’ age, until Elián reinvigorated it. While President Obama’s restoration of relations with Cuba opened up some productive family discussions, the grudge from 2000 persists.