Incumbent: Mario Diaz-Balart, R
This is the 17th of the Almanac’s updated House district profiles for the newly drawn districts in Florida. They have been written by Senior Author Rich Cohen. As with all new Almanac content on this Substack, they will be accessible only to paid subscribers. We will run a new Florida district profile every day or so until we’ve exhausted the new writeups.
Hialeah, Pembroke Pines: Over the past 60 years, Cuban Americans have proven to be one of America’s most dynamic immigrant groups, growing from 79,000 in 1960, the year after Fidel Castro took over Cuba, to more than 2.5 million today. They almost single-handedly transformed Miami-Dade County from a place that John F. Kennedy won by 15 percentage points in 1960 to one that George H.W. Bush won by 11 percentage points in 1988. Over time, the Cuban-American population of Miami expanded west to the Florida Turnpike Extension in Fontainebleau and Sweetwater and northwest to Hialeah. Starting in the 1980s, the area saw an influx of other Latinos, from Nicaragua, Venezuela and Colombia. In the process, new communities were forged and old ones were transformed.