Lincoln Díaz-Balart, a ‘Free Cuba' Republican in Congress, Dies at 70

New York Times

04-03-2025

Lincoln Díaz-Balart, a staunchly anti-communist Florida Republican who helped enshrine into law the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and who defended immigrants' rights during his nearly two decades in Congress, died on Monday at his home in Key Biscayne, Fla. He was 70.
His death was announced in a statement by his two younger brothers, Representative Mario Díaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, and the television anchor José Díaz-Balart of MSNBC and NBC News. The cause was cancer, according to Representative Díaz-Balart's office.
The scion of a political family in Cuba, Lincoln Díaz-Balart forged his own political career on the other side of the Florida Straits, becoming a fiery orator and a persuasive behind-the-scenes legislator in the House of Representatives at a time when Cuban Americans exerted their peak influence on U.S. policies and elections.
In the heavily Cuban American, Miami-area district he represented for 18 years, Mr. Díaz-Balart's name became synonymous with the cause of a free Cuba — so much so that he would sometimes be asked if he hoped to someday seek office in Havana.
As a congressman in 1995, he was arrested outside the White House while protesting President Bill Clinton's Cuba policy, which was pushing for more engagement, and later helped craft the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which codified the trade embargo and other sanctions into law. The legislation kept Mr. Clinton and subsequent presidents from unilaterally lifting the embargo without the support of Congress. Critics of the embargo say it has failed because Cuba's communist regime remains unchanged.
Mr. Díaz-Balart also championed immigrants, especially those who, like him, had fled left-wing governments. In 1997, he wrote legislation that protected some 150,000 Nicaraguans and 5,000 Cubans from deportation. The law allowed hundreds of thousands of other immigrants to seek U.S. residency.
'The oppressed people of Cuba had no greater advocate for their freedom than Lincoln,' former Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a fellow Cuban American Republican who served with him during his entire time in Congress, said in an email. 'He made it his life's mission to call for democracy and human rights for his native land.'
Lincoln Rafael Díaz-Balart was born on Aug. 13, 1954, in Havana, the second of four sons of Hilda (Caballero) Díaz-Balart and Rafael Lincoln Díaz-Balart. His father, a lawyer, was the majority leader in the Cuban House of Representatives before Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. A grandfather and uncle were also in politics. An aunt, Mirta Díaz-Balart, was Castro's first wife and the mother of his son Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, known as Fidelito.
Lincoln, his older brother, Rafael, and their parents fled Cuba in 1959 after pro-Castro forces looted and burned their home during the Cuban Revolution. (The family had been away on a trip at the time.) They lived in New York, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (where Mario and José were born), Venezuela and Spain before settling in Miami.
He graduated with a degree in international relations from New College of Florida, in Sarasota, in 1976, and with a law degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1979. Mr. Díaz-Balart worked in private practice before becoming a prosecutor with the state attorney's office in Miami-Dade County.
Like many Cuban Americans, he was initially a Democrat, leading the Florida Young Democrats and running unsuccessfully for the State Legislature in 1982. But along with other Cuban exiles and their children, he began to identify as a Republican during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Díaz-Balart served as co-chairman of Democrats for Reagan in 1984 and formally switched parties in 1985, saying that Democrats were too lenient toward communists in Nicaragua and El Salvador. He was elected to the State House in 1986, to the State Senate three years later and to Congress in 1992.
While he was in office, Cuban Americans vastly increased their political power. In Miami, they became the dominant electoral demographic; at the national level, they worked in a bipartisan fashion to try to push out Castro. (One of Mr. Díaz-Balart's closest friends in Congress was former Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat and a son of Cuban exiles.)
But Mr. Díaz-Balart chafed at being cast as a one-issue legislator. Representing many working-class immigrants, he was one of only three Republicans to oppose his party's Contract With America in 1994, and he opposed welfare reform in 1996. Both the party platform and the legislation cut off benefits to legal immigrants. He succeeded a year later in getting disability benefits and food stamps restored for hundreds of thousands of older people and legal immigrants.
His most serious electoral challenge came in 2008, when national Democrats tried to unseat Miami's three Cuban American Republican members of Congress: Mr. Díaz-Balart, his brother and Ms. Ros-Lehtinen. All three won re-election, but it would be Mr. Díaz-Balart's final term. In 2010, he announced that he would not seek re-election that year and instead return to practicing law and work as a lobbyist. His brother then ran for the seat, which leaned more heavily Republican than his own, and won it in 2010.
By then, the Tea Party movement had formed, and Republican politics were changing, said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Cuban American Republican whose political career began in Mr. Díaz-Balart's office.
'He was just a statesman in every sense of the word,' said Mr. Curbelo, who first interned for Mr. Díaz-Balart when he was 15. 'He definitely served during a time where bipartisan collaboration was a lot more common, and there wasn't this insurgent element in the House Republican conference like there is now.'
Mr. Díaz-Balart is survived by his wife of 48 years, Cristina (Fernández) Díaz-Balart; their son, Daniel; his three brothers; and two grandsons. Another son, Lincoln Gabriel, died in 2013.
Before his death, Mr. Díaz-Balart wrote and completed a memoir titled 'Sketches From a Life,' which has yet to be published.
'Lincoln was a defender of the silenced and the oppressed,' José Díaz-Balart said in closing an MSNBC broadcast on Monday. 'He lived a life of service, and did so in the most generous, effective and compassionate way.'