Moreover, if the claims of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Washington-based Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration are accurate, today there are more than 650,000 Puerto Ricans living in the state.

Florida's Cuban-American population, by comparison, was 833,000, according to the 2000 Census. Conservative Cubans are credited with helping George W. Bush win Florida that year by 537 votes.

More significant is the fact that the majority of Puerto Ricans live in the hotly contested Interstate 4 corridor in central Florida. Crossing the state from Tampa on the west coast to Daytona Beach on the east coast and comprising 14 of Florida's 67 counties, it is the main battleground for the 2004 election.

According to the Florida Department of State, as of April 2003, there were 9.3 million registered voters in Florida, 3.7 million of them in the I-4 corridor. Of those 9.3 million, about 3.6 million are Republicans, 3.9 million are Democrats and 1.7 million are neither. The bulk of these undecided voters live in the I-4 corridor.

"That group of voters, this emerging non-Cuban vote that is centered in Orlando and Tampa and to a certain extent South Florida, is becoming one of the most important battlegrounds in Florida," Sergio Bendixen, a pollster who specializes in monitoring the state's Latino vote, told the Post.

Angelo Falcon, a senior policy analyst for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, told the Post that the influx of Puerto Ricans, who have tended to vote for Democrats, could "offset the Cuban vote," which almost uniformly has gone to conservatives because of their promise to continue isolating Castro's Communist government.

Republicans counter that, even with the large new Puerto Rican voting bloc living in the 1-4 corridor, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush won the area in the 2002 statewide elections. And Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, told the Post that Puerto Ricans in Central Florida voted overwhelmingly for Florida's Jeb Bush in 2002.

The Post speculated that it is questionable whether Puerto Ricans can overcome the Cuban Americans' electoral clout and notes that Cubans in the Miami area are highly organized and motivated.

Cuban Americans made up roughly 65 percent of Florida's 660,000 Latino voters in 2002, even though they were only 31 percent of the state's Latino population, according to the census. With the influx of non-Cuban Latinos, Bendixen and others are predicting that the Cuban vote ratio will drop to 50 percent.

Editor's note: