A Cuban bakery located in Florida is now the center of a conservative boycott campaign after the establishment hosted a visit from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, along with another Democratic congressional candidate. Jeffries and Eliot Rodriguez, who is campaigning for Florida’s 27th District, visited a bakery in Pinecrest, which is a suburb of Miami.
The two men met with one of the bakery’s owners in what appeared to be a typical campaign stop. Rodriguez took video footage of the stop and later posted it on social media. The footage featured Rodriguez standing next to CAO Bakery co-owner Yvette Cao. The video shows Cao giving Jeffries a “care package” of pastries.
Jeffries then thanks her for hosting them and thanked Rodriguez for his commitment to “making this community, making Florida and making the country more affordable.” Unfortunately for the business owners, the stop set social media ablaze with backlash from the Miami Cuban community, with many individuals accusing the bakery of supporting “socialism” by hosting the two Democrats.
According to a report from The Washington Sun, this is an extremely sensitive subject for the Cuban exiles who fled their home country’s communist government. A few locals left scathing comments on the video saying they would not longer be patronizing the business, while supporters of the bakery said they would exclusively buy Cuban pastries from the bakery.
“I was a loyal Saturday morning customer until now,” wrote one individual. “I will never set foot in any of your stores again.” The backlash was so severe that Cao issued an apology, posting on the bakery’s Instagram account, “To the Cao community, I’ve read your messages and I understand why Friday hurts.” She then clarified that hosting the Democrats was not an endorsement.
“Cao stands with our Cuban American community for a free Cuba and condemns Socialism. That will never change,” she said in the post. Cao then explained that Rodriguez’s campaign reached out to the bakery the day before the event, asking if they could stop in at the location and greet folks within the community.
“As a business, we don’t discriminate based on political views, but at the same time, I didn’t know it would turn into a press conference,” she went on to say, adding: “Our family is here because of what our parents and grandparents gave up to be here. We know what they left behind, and everything we’ve built comes from the freedom this country gave us.”
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Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, Rodriguez’s opponent, took to social media platform X to comment on the controversy, writing, “Eliott Rodriguez brought the man who wants to lead the socialists in Congress into a Cuban bakery in Miami and, in one move, showed just how little he knows this community.” She then said, “He and his socialist friends turned a Cuban small business into a political prop and left the business dealing with the fallout.”
“It is an insult to parade this ideology through a community built by survivors of socialism and embrace the very people who champion it,” Salazar said. Polling data has consistently revealed that there is strong support for President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the Florida Cuban community, a fact that helped Trump take Miami-Dade County in the 2024 election, marking the first time it flipped red since 1988.
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video