Male, Latino and a Trump voter: ‘I am a very humane Republican’

On November 5, Niober Licea went to bed at around 1 a.m., when he learned that his vote had gone the same way as the entire state, with the media reporting that North Carolina was completely red on the nation’s map. When he got up to go to work the next day, the country already had a president for the next four years.

— I said wow, that’s great. Congratulations to Donald Trump, the president.

Niober was born in Manzanillo, in eastern Cuba. He then moved to Havana with his family and in 2006, at the age of 29, he arranged a trip to Mexico and crossed the border. All he has done since then is work very hard. Now, at 49, he drives through the streets of Raleigh and feels lucky to witness the spectacle of the fall, to see the colors of the leaves, the sun that sets early, the temperature that feels cooler. To understand how the city of yesterday is not the same city of today.

If a few days ago North Carolina was an undecided state in the midst of the electoral whirlwind, today it is the place that elected candidate Donald Trump as president, who received 51.0% of the votes against 47.7% for Kamala Harris. The old northern state, coveted on a par with Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, was loyal to the Republican as it was in 2016 and again in 2020.

Niober has been heavily criticized for voting for Trump, as did a majority of Latino men in these elections, according to the polls. But he believes his vote does not have to “please anyone.”

— With Trump we had gas for a little more than a dollar, food was not so expensive, rent and salaries were leveled, and we had peace, we had no wars in his four years and that is very important. He really is a person who loves his country and why not give him the opportunity. I already lived through his first four years and they were good.

Niober has an answer for every question or crossroads that his decision has placed him in. He says that Trump is not a misogynist since he has chosen Susie Wiles to be his chief of staff; he is not against abortion, only “indiscriminate” abortion; he is not against weapons, but against their possession without prior examination; although he does not like the smell, he is in favor of marijuana. He remembers that former president Ronald Reagan, a Republican, was the one who legalized almost three million immigrants with his immigration reform; that with Obama “the Democrats had Congress, the Senate, the presidency and even the Supreme Court” and they never carried out immigration reform; that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and was the one who gave slaves their freedom; that it was the Democrats who implemented the humanitarian parole program and now they will leave thousands of immigrants in legal limbo. And above all, Niober believes that the border, the same one he crossed several years ago, must be regulated.

That doesn’t automatically make him a bad person, he explains. If there’s one thing he finds unbearable, it’s the belief that Republicans are inhumane people. Well, they’re not, he says. At least he himself couldn’t be.

— I come from the bottom, I am not rich, nor is my family rich. My workers are humble people. I have employees who have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and you feel bad for them because they have been in this country for so many years. I have not lost my awareness of it, what I’ve done is I’ve become a much more humane Republican. They know that I am a Republican. They can talk to me and I allow them to say whatever they want.

He does not see a contradiction, for example, in the fact of being a Republican and having entered the country through the border, or in voting for Trump and having brought part of his family to the U.S. as beneficiaries of the humanitarian parole program that Trump now threatens to eliminate.

— I think that the border is currently in a tremendous state of disarray. No one is against people coming in. But the United States should be much more careful. Look at how many criminals have come through the border, how many Cuban oppressors are blatantly established in the United States. When Barack Obama was in power, there were children who came alone. It is no less true that we need people in this country, but how can we talk about immigration when there are millions of illegals in the shadows in this country, who have not been given papers, who have American children now in college. It is not fair that these people are being denied the right to get a work permit and to get out of the situation they are in, when they have been here for so many years. People are against immigrants who are criminals, but not against those who work, because 90% of the people who come are immigrants like me, who came to work and to continue to make this nation great, which not by chance has been the largest democracy for 200 years.

His red choice has indeed brought him family problems, and the loss of friendships of more than 20 years. But Niober could list the reasons why he is a Cuban Republican, or why he never saw the Democratic candidate as the next president of the United States: “I never saw Kamala Harris as someone to choose. They were using the image that she was a woman, that she was African American, that she was of Hindu origin, but her work, the little that she was entrusted with, was the problem of the border and it turned out to be a disaster.” It could also explain why one day he was an Obama supporter and five years later he voted for the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.

— I thought Barack Obama was someone fresh, different, who brought ideas, a very talkative person, who was close to the people, to the workers. At that time, he represented the values of the American middle-class worker that the Democratic Party always represented. He spoke and made you remember those things, that he was close to the American people.

By the time Niober was able to vote for the first time in 2012 — after taking advantage of the Cuban Adjustment Act and becoming a naturalized citizen after five years as a permanent resident — his opinion of the Democrat had completely changed and he cast his vote for Romney.

— Although I think Obama recovered the economy, it was at the cost of a lot of sacrifice. He implemented Obamacare, but people forget that if a business owner had more than four employees, he had to provide health insurance for them. It then happened that many people ended up having part-time jobs, and their bosses were not obliged to give them health insurance. I was one of those people. They cut back my hours and I had to work up to three jobs. From the time I came to this country until I became a citizen, I underwent a transformation. I realized that there were strange things within the Democratic Party; progressive or left-wing currents were beginning to emerge.

For example, Niober always considered it “an abuse to take advantage of food stamps,” Medicaid, or money that benefited him during his first days in the United States. “People often applied for unemployment, people got used to not working, to settling down. I only benefited from food stamps when I arrived in March. As soon as I started working in May with my work permit, my family told me that I had to give up that aid. I went to the Children and Family department and gave up all that. By the time it was my turn to vote, I no longer felt comfortable with Obama, I had three jobs, I worked a lot, inflation was very high, times were very hard and I was alone here.”

Romney, however, seemed to him to be someone to admire, having launched his “Romneycare” program as governor of Massachusetts in 2002 long before Obama, which provided access to health insurance through state-level subsidies. “I liked that. I have never understood how the United States, being the world’s leading power, has a health system that does not cover all social needs. I am not against privatization, but I am not comfortable with the thought that other European nations have managed to have this socialized health system and we still have this situation here.”

If Democrats did a better job tomorrow, Niober might just vote for them. In fact, he cast his ballot for North Carolina governor not for Republican Mark Robinson but for Democrat Josh Stein. But he never saw Harris as an option.

— If Kamala Harris was the vice president of this country for four years, why didn’t she do everything she said she was going to do now before? Why are they now finding out that there is inflation and that the average American can’t buy a house? Bernie Sanders, the only one who has really said he is a socialist, an admirer of Fidel Castro, made it very clear to the Democrats: they distanced themselves from the working people. First the whites left, then the Blacks left, and finally the Latinos left. The Democrats are no longer the honorable party they were 40 years ago and people are tired of it.

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