What do we know about Cuba-born registered voters in South Florida?

With the recent revocation by the Trump Administration of the humanitarian parole program, hundreds-of-thousands of Cubans legally in the U.S. face deportation

Late last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it was revoking legal protections roughly half-a-million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who have emigrated to the U.S. since October 2022. These individuals, who had financial sponsors and arrived in the U.S. legally with two-year permits to work in the U.S. have been informed that the will lose their legal status next month and will be deported.

In my last post, I dug into the party registration and voting patterns of perhaps the most Venezuelan-American city in the U.S.—Doral, Miami-Dade County, Florida. As I wrote then, I’ve been curating the places of birth of Florida registered voters for nearly 15 years, drawing on data I’ve culled from publicly available files. In Florida, individuals may include their “State or Country of Birth” when registering or reregistering to vote. Though it’s not required, millions of Floridians have included this information over the years, but the data are a mess; the data-cleaning of these entries is a painstaking process, as the space on a voter registration form that voters have to provide their information is extremely limited, as you can see, below.

Excluding the non-specific birthplaces such as “U.S.”, “United States,” “USA” and countless other permutations, as well as illegible or unknowable places of birth, I now have birthplace information for over 6.7 million registered voters from 302 American states, territories, as well as other countries.

Among these are 448k Florida registered voters who were born in Cuba at the time of the 2024 General Election. (My total count is roughly 460k Cuba-born registered voters, but that includes some who were removed from or added to the rolls after the election.) Although some of these individuals were likely born as American citizens (e.g., one or both parents was a U.S. citizen at the time of the child’s birth or they were born on a U.S. military base, such as Guantanamo), most likely became naturalized U.S. citizens and then subsequently registered to vote.

Besides Florida-born (1.6m) and those born in New York (484k) who were registered to vote in Florida at the time of the 2024 GE, Cuba-born registered voters in my dataset top those born everywhere else, including Puerto Rico-born (313k).

So who are these Cuba-born naturalized U.S. citizens registered voters in Florida? Where do they live? What party are they registered to vote with? What race/ethnicity do they identify as? What is their age breakdown? And most importantly, how do precincts with high density of Cuban-born registrants vote?

Although every one of Florida’s 67 counties count multiple Cuba-born registered voters on their rolls, it is not surprising that 66%, over 295k identifiable Cuba-born registered voters call Miami-Dade home. Other counties have their fair share of Cuba-born registered voters, most notably Broward (30k), Hillsborough (23k), Palm Beach (18k), and Lee (17k). Again, this is an undercount (not all registrants put down their place of birth and I’m not able to decipher all entries, including, no doubt, places in Cuba) and it expressly does not include Cuban-Americans born in the U.S.

There are some big surprises, though.