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Dems pounce on Rubio story; Rubio pushes back

Posted Oct 21, 2011 by William March

Updated Oct 21, 2011 at 04:47 PM

Democrats pounced Friday on a Washington Post report that Marco Rubio “embellished” his family’s history as Cuban exiles, but Rubio shot back, charging the story itself was embellished and “outrageous.”

The Post story said that while Rubio has long referred to his family as exiles or refugees from Castro in Cuba, in fact they came to the U.S. three years before Castro took over—not after the takeover, as his official bio on his U.S. Senate website said.

In a news release, the Democratic Party’s U.S. Senate campaign organization said the report is “just one more incident to add to Rubio’s long list of ethics issues and allegations of misconduct.” It linked the issue to Rubio’s involvement in the state Republican Party financial scandal of 2006, which involved his use of a Republican Party credit card to pay some personal expenses.

“Marco Rubio has a chronic credibility problem,” said Matt Canter, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Rubio seriously struggles to tell the truth and can’t be trusted.”

Rubio himself issued a statement saying it was “outrageous” for the story to suggest that he embellished his family history for political gain.

“The dates I have given regarding my family’s history have always been based on my parents’ recollections of events that occurred over 55 years ago and which were relayed to me by them more than two decades after they happened,” he said.  “I was not made aware of the exact dates until very recently.

“What’s important is that the essential facts of my family’s story are completely accurate,” he said. After immigrating, “they had always hoped to one day return to Cuba if things improved and traveled there several times.”

When that proved impossible, “They were exiled from the home country they tried to return to because they did not want to live under communism. That is an undisputed fact and to suggest otherwise is outrageous.”

Rubio also put out a news release citing local press accounts noting that in most of his public comments on his family’s history, he didn’t say explicitly that his family came here after Castro’s accession to power—only that they fled a country with political oppression and limited economic opportunity.

It’s not unusual, local press accounts are noting, for people who left Cuba shortly before Castro’s takeover to think of themselves and call themselves “exiles” or “refugees” from Castro’s Cuba.

Rubio’s staff says his website will be revised soon, Rubio’s staff said, but as of early afternoon today, it still had the old wording saying his parents “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.”

Pepe Hernandez, head of the influential Cuban-American National Foundation, took Rubio’s side in the argument, saying the story was “totally wrong” and “of no significance in our community.”

He noted that Cuba was under a dictatorship by Fulgencio Batista and violently unstable prior to Castro’s accession, and many Cubans came to the U.S. at that time.

“All of us came at different dates and times, but all seeking freedom and stability for our families,” he said. “I don’t see any difference whatsoever with somebody that came in 1956, when there was a dictatorship in Cuba, and in 1960 like myself.”