That, however, is lower than the estimated 82 percent of those Cuban-Americans who voted for Bush in 2000, Antonio Gonzalez, president of the institute told the Sun Sentinel.

"There is an alarm going off, a danger signal for the president," Gonzalez told the newspaper. "This is a very important constituency for him." He added that the Kerry campaign could woo away a significant number of Cuban-Americans.

The poll results, however, also reveal that should Bush lose as much as a third of his 2000 election Cuban-American supporters, they will not automatically end up voting for Kerry, whose record on the Cuban issue -- like many of his stands on other issues -- is spotty at best. In the poll a mere 16 percent of those surveyed said they support Kerry.

The poll was co-sponsored by the Cuban American Commission for Family Rights, an organization that opposes the Bush administration's new travel restrictions on Cuban-Americans, which allow them to travel to Cuba only once every three years. The new rules also reduces the list of relatives in Cuba that they can get government permission to visit.

The survey of 812 respondents, was conducted between June 29 and July 7, and has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. The newspaper speculated that because President Bush won the 2000 election by 537 votes in Florida, any drop in support by the largely Republican Cuban-American community, "is seen by many as a threat to his re-election effort."

The Sun Sentinel failed to reveal just who are among the "many."

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Editor's note: