White House Hopeful Marco Rubio: Cuban Heritage, American Dream

As a child, Marco Rubio assured his exiled Cuban grandfather that he would overthrow Fidel Castro and lead Cuba. Today, at 43, he harbors a new aspiration: to be president of the United States.

The Republican senator from Florida, told voters Monday that he was in the race to start a "new American century," ending two years of speculation about whether he will pursue a 2016 campaign for the White House.

Back in February, 12 months ahead of presidential primaries, he was already an all-but-declared candidate, publishing a big ideas book and launching a tour of the states that vote earliest in the nomination process.

Rubio was born in Miami in 1971, the son of poor Cuban refugees who had fled the island 15 years earlier to escape poverty.

After Castro seized power in 1959, the family decided never to return to Cuba, a country Marco Rubio has never known.

But Cuba is a recurring theme for the first-term senator, whose ambitions reflect those of generations of refugees eager to carve out better lives in America.

"I am the son of immigrants, exiles from a troubled country," he wrote in his 2012 memoir, "An American Son."

"They gave me everything it was in their power to give. And I am proof their lives mattered, their existence had a purpose."

Rubio has chosen Freedom Tower, a Miami landmark known as the "Ellis Island of the South" for processing thousands of Cuban refugees, as the location for his campaign launch.

- Cuban son - 

The son of a bartender and a housemaid, Rubio grew up in Miami's Cuban-American communities, although the family spent five years in Las Vegas, where they converted briefly to the Mormon faith before returning to Catholicism.

Influenced by his grandfather, who spoke no English, Rubio developed a passion for politics. He was a fan of Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democratic icon, before falling hard for Republican president Ronald Reagan.

Americans nationally learned of Rubio in 2010 when as an underdog he spectacularly won election to the Senate, riding the Tea Party wave that sent several small-government conservatives to Congress.

While some Republicans privately argue it is too early for a Rubio presidential run, many envision him becoming the nation's first Hispanic commander-in-chief, a rags-to-political-riches story embodying the American Dream.

Just two years after earning a law degree, he was elected in 1998 to the West Miami City Commission. A year later, it was Florida's House of Representatives, where he rose to become speaker in 2006.

In his memoir Rubio offers inexhaustible detail of his political maneuverings that boosted his career, at the risk of appearing motivated more by power than political ideas.

Rubio is a compelling package: handsome with an engaging smile and charismatic oratory, despite an occasional rapid-fire delivery and a visible impatience.

He breaks the traditional social conservative mold: he goes to church with wife Jeanette and their four children, but since childhood he has been a hip-hop fan, often hailing genre pioneers Grandmaster Flash and Tupac Shakur.

And he is bilingual, a major asset for the Republican Party, which has felt the sting of Hispanic voter abandonment.

- Interventionist - 

On his arrival in Washington, conservatives traumatized by Barack Obama's election believed they had found their savior.

But his Tea Party support plunged in 2013 after he helped craft comprehensive immigration reform that would have legalized millions of undocumented migrants.

Rubio has sought to recover. While backing off of his immigration plan, he engages in other substantive legislative efforts, ostensibly to prove that beyond his formidable communication skills he can lead a conservative ideological renewal.

Rubio has unveiled proposals to reduce poverty and introduced pension system reforms -- without forgetting fundamental conservative values like traditional marriage.

"We need to recognize societal breakdown, the fact that too many Americans in childhood are not acquiring values like hard work and sacrifice and self-control. We need to reinvigorate American society," he told AFP in a 2013 interview.

It was Rubio's championing of aggressive foreign policy and a muscular defense that opened him to criticism from his party's isolationist camp, particularly from a 2016 rival, Libertarian-leaning Senator Rand Paul.

"The world is at its safest when America is at its strongest," Rubio said in September, invoking Reagan.

On foreign affairs Rubio sometimes aligns with hawkish Senator John McCain, arguing that global flashpoints including Iran, Syria and Ukraine require Washington be more engaged abroad.

Such positioning has led him to place Cuba in the same category as Iran -- isolate the regime at all costs.

Rubio's kickoff notably comes just days after Obama shook hands with Cuban strongman Raul Castro at a Latin American summit, the visual symbol of a detente to which Rubio is fiercely opposed.