For Rubio, filial piety has meant adopting the very Cold War outlook that most of his peers have shed. Students of generational identity, starting with Karl Mannheim, have long observed that people are disproportionately influenced by the events that occur in their late teens and twenties, once they leave their parents’ homes and begin seeing the world through independent eyes. A classic example is Hillary Clinton, who attended Wellesley College and Yale Law School at the height of the Vietnam War, and in rejecting the war came to reject her father’s right-wing Republicanism as well. Similarly, Rubio’s generation of Cuban Americans entered adulthood as the Cold War was drawing to a close, which helps explain why anti-Communism does not dominate their political outlook in the way it does many of their parents’.
In American Son, however, Rubio roots his political identity not in incipient adulthood but in childhood. His grandfather, a Castro-hating shoemaker named Pedro Victor Garcia who left Cuba in 1956, “was my mentor and my closest boyhood friend,” he writes. As a child, Rubio writes, “I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba.” Garcia loved Ronald Reagan’s militant anti-Communism. Rubio writes, “Reagan’s election and my grandfather’s allegiance to him were defining influences on me politically. I’ve been a Republican ever since.” Rubio’s defining political influence, in other words, occurred when he was 9 years old.
Why didn’t Rubio’s views evolve as he entered adulthood, as happened for so many of his peers? Perhaps because as an aspiring politician, his success depended on cultivating the older, more hawkish Cubans who dominated Miami-Dade County.
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