I once worked at the same K-Mart on Coral Way and 87th Avenue as Marco Rubio‘s mother.
Mine started as an after school job right before the holidays and lasted through the winter break at the “trim-a-tree” department, 
which is what they called the small area in a middle isle stacked with Christmas and holiday merchandise. I wanted to have my “own money” — that I didn’t ask my parents for — to buy vinyl records (which are back in style) and jeans with holes in them (which never went out).
Not sure if we worked there at the same time, me and Sra. Rubio. I was in the 10th grade. A 15-year-old. So the senator would have been, what? Nine? It’s possible.
But whether or not we crossed our 15 minutes in the break room is unimportant. Because this new piece of information for me is simply one more example of how Marco Rubio is more like us than any other presidential candidate — not just in the 2016 election, but possibly in the history of presidents.
He came from our neighborhoods. West Miami, to be exact, which is pretty working class. He went to same public school my brother went to (my sister and I were sent to St. Brendan). He played sports at our parks. His parents worked two jobs to make ends meet.
He speaks our language — both figuratively and literally.
And that is what came through the most when Rubio spoke at the community center in his hometown of West Miami Saturday — after the mostly friendly crowd sang Happy Birthday to his wife Jeanette.
“He reminds me of my brother. He is one of us,” said one woman who was already a fan.
Read related story: Marco Rubio comes home to low-key gig for neighbors, pals
“He has a genuine feel. To me, that is unique in all the candidates,” said Sergio Diaz,
whose sister had made him come to hear her hero. It was the first time he heard Rubio speak without a TV set between them. “I feel like he could be one of my friends — one of the guys over on Sunday for football and a cook-out.”
Just don’t serve Spam, Sergio.
“I never had a Spam croqueta. And I never will,” Rubio said to rousing laughter, referring to the canned meat Cuban refugees got in a care package when they were processed at the Freedom Tower in the early 1960s. They also got peanut butter, which most Cubans had never seen. “They put it on their face, like cream,” Rubio said.
It was one of many moments that Rubio drifted off script in what was possibly one of his most intimate and fun-loving speeches in months, maybe years.
Rubio walked in from the rain drying himself with paper napkins handed to him by a staffer and joked about the humidity. “It was hotter at the CNN debate,” he said.
“It’s great to be home,” the city commissioner turned U.S. Senator said, about a stone’s throw from his actual house. “And when I say home, I mean home. This is the park I used to play in as a child,” Rubio said on stage of the Rebeca Sosa MultiPurpose Facility, named after his political godmother, a county commissioner and former West Miami mayor.
“But there was no building then. I think the swing set was right here,” Rubio said, adding that music mogul Pitbull also played at the park and that it was where he first spotted Jeanette as he played volleyball — and immediately tried to show off. He talked about how he bought a home there after they were married, blocks from his parents.
“The water bill is due. I think that’s why the city manager is here,” he said, after he had hugged City Manager Yolanda Aguilar, who called it a “a historic moment for the history of West Miami.”
Read related story: Marco Rubio — more like us than any other POTUS wannabe
Rubio spoke to the crowd of about 500 people — many of them old friends, neighbors and political colleagues — in both English and
Spanish. In fact, he spoke more Spanish on this early, rainy Saturday morning than he has on maybe the whole of the campaign trail.
And that Spanish was effortless and almost flawless. Or as flawless as you can get in Cuban, anyway. He noted the difference on the stage when he bashed the current administration for cutting defense spending by a trillion dollars. “Trillion! How do you say that in Spanish? Not in Cuban, but in Spanish,” he asked. The crowd roared and offered him the Cuban answer anyway: “Trillon.” It’s billon, actually. But it’s close enough.
That facility with both languages is going to appeal to the few Hispanic Republican voters and, more importantly, will help peel off Latino votes from Hillary once he’s cleared the primary. We’ve never had a president who can talk to us in our own language. Jeb! Bush learned the language from his wife and speaks it well, but with considerable effort and a thick gringo accent. And Ted Cruz refuses to give even a soundbite en espanol.
Flowing effortlessly from English to Spanish and back again, Rubio covered most of his stump speech staples in bullet form.
On freedom and anti-terrorism: “The world has become a more dangerous place. This is the world we live in,” Rubio said, mentioning the terrorist attacks in San Bernadino and Paris. “The more dangerous the world is, the stronger America needs to be,” he said, adding that Obama’s proposed cuts to the U.S. Defense budget would “leave us with the oldest and smallest Air Force we’ve ever had.”
On homeland security. He waxed hopeful that the election in Venezuela the next day would bring change to their government and lashed out at the U.S. olive branch to the Castro brothers in Cuba, calling renewed relations a “one sided deal that gives them everything they want and gets nothing in return.” He called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “gangster.”
On limited government: “Our rights don’t come from the government, they come from God. The role of our government is to protect those rights, not to grant them or decide them.”
On economic liberty: “This is the only free economic system in the world where we don’t have to make rich people poor to make poor people rich,” he said, adding “sometimes out of a spare bedroom in a home… which is a violation of the West Miami code.
He had earlier told people that he started his political career on the city’s code enforcement board — a killer for a would be politician. “Because if your neighbor paints his house the wrong color now you have to fine him. It’s not good for votes.”
Read related story: Marco Rubio shines bright at Jeb-less Lincoln Day Dinner
Walking the streets of West Miami in 1998 — with Commissioner Sosa, who introduced him, at his side — showed him that other families were like his. He talked to doctors who washed dishes and professors who sewed at factories who never were able to recover their prior lives after they left Cuba. “But they adopted a new dream, to leave their children with a better life… not to let what happened
to them ever happen to their children.
“The story of this community is not the story of a people who have had it easy.”
And then he emphasized his optimistic message about a new American century. “The greatest era of the history of this country lies ahead of us,” he said. “Not only will we win, but we’ll change the direction of this country and leave it better for our children.”
Then he told the mostly Cuban-American crowd that he would proudly display their culture at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: “Vamos a llevar una caja china a la Casa Blanca,” he said, referring to the Cuban way of roasting a whole pig in a box or a hole in the back yard, which he said he would take to the White House.
“Y, por supuesto, una cafetera,” he added, about a stove top Cuban coffee maker.
Granted, Rubio was preaching to the choir here. There was only a tiny minority, like Diaz, who came in without their minds made up already. One woman said she was still undecided because of Rubio’s position blocking Syrian refugees from entering the U.S.
But most of the crowd was adoring. He even had a “positive heckler,” as he clarified
to the English speaking press. And Rubio stayed for about an hour afterwards, making three rounds to shake everyone’s hand and take selfies with the mother of the city manager, someone’s babies, children of neighbors and a series of giddy abuelas.
And a blogger-turned-fangirl who used to work at the same K-mart as his mom.
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Sorry Elaine but Rubio is lobbyist, not presidential material.
The Cuban card will not work, most Cuban Americans can not stand him.
Aside from Miami not many people don’t even know him. The Dade county voters cannot vote him into power.
Look for him to drop out of the campaign as soon as the money dries up. After all the abuelos savings eventually will run out.
I understand the symbolism of having a personal connection to this candidate, growing up in the same neighborhood and sometimes crossing paths. That’s neat!
But, I think you’re being biased here.
He is your neighbor no longer. He’s a politician that panders to voters, comforting them with positive messages that are empty in value, “The greatest era of the history of this country lies ahead of us,” and “Not only will we win, but we’ll change the direction of this country and leave it better for our children.” All candidates say these things and they mean nothing. They’re positive, yes, but their vague and not specific, and they have no value other than to promise something that has no guarantee. And these quotes certainly can tickle our hearts, but they’re statements that nobody can disagree with.
Marco talks of Cuban culture (of course he’s in front of a hispanic audience), his supporters talk about his feel good aura, how he reminds them of their brothers. Marco could be a friend in the same way YouTube star can be your friend. But, that reveals more about his good looks and charm than his relationship to his constituents or his potential as president. Disrespectfully, he uses fear mongering on his own supporters, “The world has become a more dangerous place. This is the world we live in.” That’s actually a fallacy. The world has never been safer. More exposed, yes. But, safer. Terrorism threats are meaningful, yes, and there are victims, but there are things that kill more people in the US that we should be looking to resolve. More people die of gun deaths than terrorism. The Cold War saw the greatest danger the world has ever seen, and this was perpetuated by a war! By an arms race that called for gigantic expenditures on defense. Marco Rubio wants to do just that. War affects all types of people outside the targeted enemy, and these people’s lives are ruined and affected, which promotes terrorism and makes it more common and global society more segmented.
—You quoted, “The story of this community is not the story of a people who have had it easy.” Hey, he’s talking about me! He’s just like me!—
Putting his excellent political skills—taking pictures, relating to people in a positive way that garners votes, roast pork, vague feel-good statements, etc.—aside if we look at his fighting fors, it’s plain and obvious his heart isn’t in his community:
SYRIAN REFUGGES
You mentioned his stance on Syrian refugees. There are 4 something million Syrian refugees who had no option but to leave all they knew and had behind to save their lives and their children’s lives from a raging war. As an American president, one of the most powerful positions on earth, his community would be literally the Earth. He needs to promote acceptance and reason, not xenophobia. Minorities know something about xenophobia. It’s not good. In Britain, a country that has always had a muslim population, people fear that taking in refugees would mean a takeover of muslims. However, if it was to take all refugees and all of them were muslim, you’d still only see an increase of 1% in the muslim population. Immigrants have been shown to assimilate into the receiving culture. They feed money back into social systems, and more than they take in benefits. They are also known to cause less crime than the natural population. How, as fellow human beings, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, friends, neighbors, can we not sympathize with these people who have suffered incredible ills and misfortune? Would God not want us to help those who have fallen? Where is Marco Rubio’s intense devotion to God’s principles? Lost to fear-mongering.
DEFENSE BUDGET
We all know that money, especially government money, is running short. In fact, in unsurmountable debt. Which means, nothing gets funded unless there is money to be made. Such is our war machine. There are undeniable corporate interests. Why don’t we go into a country like North Korea, who has an entire population in obscurity and living lies? War creates enemies. War divides. If people are so misinformed in America to believe Donald Trump, think of how people in the developing world might misconstrue (or perhaps truly be affected by war) military aggression from a country halfway around the world? They grow angry toward a country of unequal economic prosperity that thinks it can do what it wants. As latin Americans, we should be aware of the effects and motivations for US government intervention as there is a rich history of intervention in South America, permeated by ideas like those of Marco Rubio. You probably know more about that than I do.
GOD AND THE STATE
You quote him, “Our rights don’t come from the government, they come from God.” But, actually, our rights come from the constitution. They do not come from God. God doesn’t tell us how to deal with net neutrality, human pollution, privacy, terrorism, etc. These are things we are alone in figuring out. Believing in some mystical moment of enlightenment or an enlightened politician, a la kings and queens of time past, is like believing in magic. The bible and even the constitution cannot keep up with the changes in culture, technology, medicine that we experience today.
FRACKING AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Florida is made up of porous limestone. Marco Rubio believes that the US oil companies should drill all they want. Places in the US where drilling occurs see earthquakes crack their homes, nasty chemicals and pollutants ruin local environments in accidents that are bound to happen, etc. If that happens in the sponge that is South Florida, we will lose our community. Our children will be exposed to cancers and diseases from toxicity, the aquifers we rely upon to LIVE will be destroyed, taking with them the Everglades, our communities are being severely affected. He wants to build the XL pipeline.
GAY MARRIAGE
Look, whatever your attitude towards gay people, you have fellow neighbors who are gay, and their loved ones, who should be free to be happy. It is the big promise and a reason why everybody’s ancestors or themselves came to the US. To live freely. Again, this is not about God, which is always just an interpretation and assumption that the Bible is sacred and a direct word of God (just because it claims to be true, does that make it true?) (AND thats only the Christian perspective) People have different beliefs, and not all bar gay people from living out their lives. Marco Rubio is no better than ISIS about this. Well, he stops short of stoning them to death.
ECONOMIC LIBERTY
Ok, well he hasn’t even read up on income inequality in this country and how the top 0.1% (yes, that’s a decimal) has more money than the bottom 90%. The middle class America prospered mid 20th century has now largely disappeared. A lack of resources keeps most from getting a proper education and gaining the mental resources to improve their financial situations.
A vile human being with no good ideas. If in an alternate universe he had a chance of being elected, he would not have the mind to make this country great.
But, hey! He’s young, latino, and cute. A celebrity and a presidential candidate and a neighbor. Someone so close you can touch him. No wonder these abuelas were fawning over him.
Just because he speaks Spanish, smiles, and performs as a politician does, does’t mean he’ll make a great president. This, “he called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “gangster,” speaks more of his professionalism required for diplomacy and for a presidency that spans the world than anything else he said and promised.
ay, pero no puedo, el es como nosotros, hasta se lleva las luces rojas, falta al trabajo y hasta tomo agua..que lindo…por ahora no soy periodista pero mas una enamorada pre-teen, perdomoname mi espanglish
Ay, Marc, que equivocado e infeliz eres.
Love, Ladra
Elaine, I’m really curious about your seeming love affair with Marco. Seems quite strange. I thought you would hold politicos to higher standards of ethics.
Some people like to throw those terms out but why would this not be a higher standard? What is it about Rubio, besides that he’s Republican, that you think is beneath me? Or unethical?
He seems to me much more honest than most politicos. And that is why you see the fangirl love. I believe him. When he talks and says what he says, I believe that is really how he feels and what he really aims to do. That doesn’t happen often.
Love, Ladra
Miami i luv u