GOP losing its grip on Miami's Cuban-Americans

A job well done by fellow Florida Obama supporter Giancarlo Sopo...

When Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama took the same stage last month to address a crowd packed with Cuban-Americans he rebuked the Bush administration for tightening the embargo, a move Bush had made to appease Cuban-American hardliners.

If he became president, Obama said, he would grant "unrestricted" travel for Cuban-Americans to visit family and send remittances to the island.

In the audience was Giancarlo Sopo, a 24-year-old government and economics student, who carried a poster saying "Cubanos con Obama" despite a political pedigree that is thoroughbred Republican.

His father participated in the Bay of Pigs, and both parents were staunch Reaganites. Sopo, 24, supported Bush in 2000, though he was too young to vote then.

"I was a Bushie," he says over coffee near where he grew up in Miami's Little Havana. "I was following the traditional lineage of my family's politics."

He puts his conversion down to a confluence of factors, including Obama's inspirational life story. He also likes his humanitarian Cuba policy.

But mostly it was a factor he thinks could swing many young Cuban-American voters away from their traditional Republican party roots in 2008.

"What tipped me over? It was the Iraq war," he says.

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