SECOND OPINIONS : Why One Conservative Wants Out of the GOP : For a Cuban American from a right-wing background, the Prop. 187 campaign last year was shocking proof that Republicans did not want him anymore.

As a Cuban American living in the United States since 1959, with impeccable right-wing credentials, I have come to the following conclusions:

* To vote Republican in California, especially in the last election, is unacceptable for me as a Cuban American.

* I am going to live and die in this country, and to vote for a party that uses my skin color, my accent or the spelling of my last name as a means of getting votes from racists is sheer insanity.

So I say goodby Republicans, hello Democrats, because our future is here, our children are here, not in Havana or Managua.

*

For years, the Republican Party has taken for granted the allegiance of two Latino groups in the United States whose primary motive for immigrating has been politics, not economics.

Cubans, and more recently Nicaraguans, have been true-blue party supporters for many years. This is because in both communities the Republican Party has been viewed as tougher on the regime of Fidel Castro and on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

John F. Kennedy, widely remembered favorably in Mexican American and Puerto Rican homes, is reviled in the Cuban American community. Kennedy canceled the air cover promised to the invasion force that landed at the Bay of Pigs. He was blamed for both the failure of the invasion and for the deaths of the men who landed and were left to die on the beaches, expecting air cover that never arrived.

In 1964, I remember how devastated we felt after the Barry Goldwater loss to Lyndon Johnson. At the time, we felt that Johnson would be a continuation of the Kennedy Administration, which we detested.

But Johnson, as it turned out, became one of the greatest Presidents (Vietnam the one flaw) as he moved the United States toward civil rights and the war on poverty.

Richard Nixon was widely supported, and it is no surprise that a number of the people involved in Watergate were Cuban American. After all, the CIA had always treated us well.

We considered the CIA an ally in the worldwide fight against the Communists. All other branches of the U.S. government were suspect, as of course they were obviously infiltrated by the Communists and their fellow travelers.

We cried when Nixon was forced to resign.

Ronald Reagan was beloved by our community. He said the things we wanted to hear. (“The evil empire.”) He faced down the Communists in Angola by supporting Jonas Savimbi and UNITA.

Reagan invaded Granada and kicked Fidel right in the butt.

Reagan funded the Contras and forced the downfall of the hated Sandinistas.

Reagan did to the Soviets in Afghanistan what they had done to us in Vietnam: He sent supplies and arms to the Afghans and they fought the Soviets, finally forcing them to leave in defeat.

When George Bush was beaten by Bill Clinton I bought right in to the “Slick Willie” / Rush Limbaugh diatribe.

My own experiences have been colored by politics, right-wing politics, since the day of my birth. I arrived in the United States in May, 1959, soon after the ascension of Castro in Cuba. We left our home in Havana on the same night that Fulgencio Batista fled from Havana. We were detained for three days at the airport and questioned on the whereabouts of my father and my grand-uncle, who had fled to the Dominican Republic.

The first campaign that I worked in was in 1964, for Goldwater. I was a member of the Young Americans for Freedom in high school, and in college I also worked with the Libertarian Party in California in the very early stages.

I read and believed books by Ayn Rand; I believed that men were close to perfect, and that strength and brains would always be with me, just like the heroes in her books.

Dana Rohrabacher and Pat Nolan were two of the people that I worked with at the time.

I am a member of the Mormon Church.

My conservative credentials are impeccable. In other words, I am not a lightweight leftist.

And so, these are my conclusions:

* Republicans or Democrats, embargo or no embargo, Fidel Castro will fall, Cuba will become capitalist again, and good riddance to the Communist system. How I vote makes no difference in the inevitable fall of a sick and corrupt regime. The disease is not from the outside; it is from within. (I personally favor the embargo just because Castro is against it.)

* The Republican Party has no desire to attract the Latino voter and has used the race issue to attract discontented voters. In the last election, it was Prop 187. Now it’s affirmative action. Maybe next year Gov. Pete Wilson will turn on the Irish Catholics. Who knows?

*

I have had to view political ads that were especially painful. All of them showed Latinos running across the border. (Who would have thought at the time that one of them could have been Wilson’s housekeeper, running as she was probably late for work?)

It was Kathleen Brown, Clinton and Dianne Feinstein who came out against Prop. 187. They did this knowing that it was not politically correct. When Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp came out against 187 and warned the Republican Party that it was excluding Latinos, “losing the soul of the party,” they were ignored.

Wilson told us that we did not need outsiders to tell us how to run California. Didn’t George Wallace say the same thing in Alabama?

In previous years, if two men were running for dog catcher, I would have voted for the one who hated Fidel Castro the most--never mind whether he could have caught a dog or not.

God, how I loved the Republican Party for many years. I did not want to leave it, but I had no choice; it simply did not want me any longer.