Lincoln Diaz Barato, a solid anti-communist Florida Republican who led US trade to the laws, passed away Monday at his home in Key Biscayne, Florida, who defended immigrant rights in nearly 20 years in Congress.
His death was announced in a statement by two brothers, Florida Republican president Mario Diaz Barato, and MSNBC and NBC News television anchor Jose Diaz Barato. According to the agency of Representative Díaz-Balart, the cause was cancer.
The Cuban politician’s studies have built his own political career on the other side of the Strait of Florida, becoming a fiery orator and persuasive behind-the-scenes legislator when Cuban Americans influenced US policy and elections.
Diaz Barato, a heavy Cuban-American from the Miami area that he represented for 18 years, became synonymous with the free Cuban cause.
As a member of the House of Representatives in 1995, he was arrested outside the White House, protesting President Bill Clinton’s Cuban policy. This was driving more engagement. He later helped to create the Helms Burton Act of 1996, codified the law with trade embargoes and other sanctions. The law prevented Clinton and subsequent presidents from unilaterally lifting the embargo without Congressional support. Critics of the embargo say it failed because Cuba’s communist regime remains unchanged.
Diaz Barato defended immigrants, especially those who fled the leftist government, like him. In 1997 he wrote a law protecting about 150,000 Nicaraguans and 5,000 Cubans from deportation. The law allowed hundreds of thousands of other immigrants to seek reside in the United States.
“The oppressed people in Cuba were less defending freedom than Lincoln,” a former president of Ileana Ross Letinen, a fellow Cuban-American Republican who served with him in Congress, said in an email. “He created his life mission to seek democracy and human rights in his hometown.”
Lincoln Rafael Diaz Ballato was born in Havana on August 13, 1954. His father, a lawyer, was the leader of the majority of the Cuban House of Representatives before Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. My grandfather and uncle fell into politics too. Aunt Mirta Diaz Barato was Castro’s first wife and mother to his son Fidel Castro Diaz Barato, known as Fidelitto.
Lincoln, his older brother Rafael and his parents fled Cuba in 1959 after ProCastro army looted and burned their homes during the Cuban Revolution. (The family was on a trip at the time.) They lived in New York before settling in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (where Mario and Jose were born), Venezuela and Spain, in Miami.
He received his degree in International Relations from New College, Florida, Sarasota in 1976 and a law degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1979.
Like many Cuban Americans, he was initially a Democrat, leading a young Florida Democrat in 1982, failing to meet the state legislature. But along with other Cuban exiles and their children, he began identifying Republicans during President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
Diaz Barato co-chaired Reagan’s Democrats in 1984 and officially switched political parties in 1985, stating that the Democrats were too generous towards communists in Nicaragua and El Salvador. He was elected to the State Capitol in 1986, three years later to the Senate and in 1992 to the Congress.
While he took office, Cuban Americans greatly increased their political power. In Miami, they became the dominant electoral demographic. At the national level, they worked in a bipartisan way to push Castro out. (One of Diaz Barrato’s closest friends in Congress was former Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat and son of a Cuban exile.)
However, Diaz Barato was troubled by being cast as MP No. 1. On behalf of many working-class immigrants, he was one of three Republicans who opposed the party’s contract with the United States in 1994, and in 1996 he opposed welfare reform. The party’s platform and law reduced the benefits of legal immigrants. A year later he restored the benefits of disability and food stamps for hundreds of thousands of seniors and legal immigrants.
His most serious election challenge came in 2008 when the National Democrats tried to settle Miami’s three Cuban-American Republican Congressional members Diaz Barato and his brother Ross Letinen. All three have won re-election, which will be Diaz Barrato’s final term. In 2010 he announced that he would not seek reelection that year, but instead would return to law practice and work as a lobbyist. His brother then ran towards his seat.
By then, the Tea Party movement had been formed and Republican politics had been changing, said Carlos Carbero, former representative of American Republicans in Cuba, whose political career began in Diaz Barrato’s office.
“He was a politician in every sense of the word,” said Carbero, who first interned for Diaz Barrato when he was 15.
Diaz Barato was survived by his 48-year-old wife, Christina (Fernandez) Diaz Barato. their son, Daniel. His three brothers. and two grandchildren. Another son, Lincoln Gabriel, passed away in 2013.
Before his death, Diaz Barrato wrote and completed a memoir entitled “Sketches from Sketches,” which has not yet been published.
“Lincoln was silent and advocate for the oppressed,” Jose Diaz Barato said Monday when MSNBC closed its broadcast. “He lived a life of service and did so in the most generous, effective and compassionate ways.”
