McCain’s best for Hispanics in U.S.

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s most influential advisers on Latin American affairs have one thing in common: They are Cuban Americans from Florida.

Close aides to McCain caution that it’s too early to talk about who will be their campaign’s Latin American affairs advisers and that an official team has yet to be put together. But when pressed for names of who have been briefing him recently, they mention Florida’s Cuban-American Sen. Mel Martinez and Cuban-American congress members Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros Lehtinen.

Indeed, when McCain prepared for the Dec. 9 Republican candidates forum aired nationwide by the Spanish-language Univision network — whose main audience is Latinos of Mexican descent — he did much of his homework at a small working dinner the night before in Miami with the three Cuban-American congress members. The dinner was hosted by Nicaraguan-American Republican fundraiser Ana Navarro.

In addition, the three Cuban-American Congress members and Martinez have briefed McCain on several other occasions when he addressed Latin American issues.

“It’s a privilege to be able to advise him because he is an extraordinary patriot,” Lincoln Diaz-Balart told me Friday. “We speak often to him, not only about Cuba but about the entire hemisphere.”

McCain holds the three Florida Congress members in high esteem because they stood for him when he was down in the polls, Republican insiders say. Martinez, in turn, forged a close relationship with McCain as a key backer of the Republican hopeful’s comprehensive immigration reform bill last year.

Endorsement influence

Martinez’s last-minute endorsement of McCain before the Jan. 29 Florida primary helped McCain win the Hispanic vote in the state by a landslide. Much of Florida’s Cuban-American Republican establishment, led by former Florida Republican Party Chairman Al Cardenas, had supported former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Would McCain be good for Latin America? The Republican hopeful’s aides stress that he was born in Panama, comes from a border state whose economy is closely intertwined with Mexico’s and has been in Latin America “dozens of times,” many more than Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

In addition, among Republican hopefuls, he is the most sympathetic to providing an earned path to legalization to millions of undocumented workers in America — although in recent weeks he has backtracked somewhat, saying the United States must first build up its border controls before considering a legalization process — and is a strong supporter of free trade with Colombia and other Latin American countries.

Judging from what McCain told me in an interview last year, he could also find some sympathy in Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American agricultural exporters. He said at the time that he is against U.S. farm subsidies, especially those that subsidize U.S. sugar producers to the detriment of U.S. consumers and Latin American exporters (although we haven’t heard much of this in recent months, as McCain has been campaigning in the U.S. farm belt).

My opinion: Among the leading Republican hopefuls, McCain would be the best — or the least bad — for Latin America and U.S. Hispanics.

He’s not calling for mass deportations of undocumented workers, like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee or — in a more genteel way — former hopeful Romney. Huckabee and Romney’s anti-immigration demagoguery has contributed to creating an anti-Hispanic climate in much of the country, and their deportation proposals could severely hurt the economies of Mexico and Central America that depend heavily on family remittances from their emigres.

Free trade

McCain’s strong support for free trade would also be well received in several export-hungry Latin American nations. And it’s probably true that he knows the region better than Sens. Clinton and Obama.

But most Republican politicians’ anti-immigration stands have made the party politically radioactive for many U.S. Hispanics and Latin Americans in general.

X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald.