When 21-year-old Lya Noriega watched a viral political ad urging young people not to vote, she became furious.
Now, she’s preparing to cast her first ballot.
The 2018 satirical PSA, “Dear Young People, Don’t Vote,” featured elderly people callously dismissing hot-button issues like tax cuts and gun violence. In one particularly biting remark, a senior woman says, “Climate change? That’s a ‘you’ problem. I’ll be dead soon.”
The tongue-in-cheek video is circulating on social media ahead of the November midterm elections and when Noriega first saw it, she wasn’t registered to vote.
According to a U.S. Census Bureau poll, more than 150 million Americans cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election, but young adults ages 18 to 29 had the lowest turnout of any age group. Only about 20 million Gen Z voters – like Noriega – participated, despite more than twice as many being eligible to vote.
“I never really took it as seriously as I should have until I saw this ad…it really motivated me,” she said. “I was like, ‘screw you,’ now I want to have a voice in my community.”
Born in Cuba, Noriega moved to the U.S. at 3 years old. Now, she’s studying biology at Miami Dade College and plans to pursue a career in marine biology.
But as Noriega prepares to cast her ballot, she’s wrestling with a political divide at home.
As the lone Democrat in a Republican household, Noriega often finds herself on the opposite side of the political aisle from her own family. When politics comes up, she said, she feels like the “black sheep.”
READ MORE: South Florida schools fear voter confusion between Amendment 3 and popular school funding referendum
“Sometimes I feel like they kind of ridicule me for my views, and they don’t take me seriously,” she said. “They just call me ‘woke,’ and it’s frustrating and very isolating.”
That divide is not unusual in Miami’s Cuban-American community, where Cubans have a longstanding distrust of the Democratic Party, which many associate with being too close to socialism or communism. The suspicion dates back to Cold War-era opposition to Cuba’s late dictator Fidel Castro, and those political narratives continue to resonate in South Florida, even as their influence has waned elsewhere in the country.
In 2024, Latino voters were widely seen as a key constituency in President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In Florida, 70% of Cuban American voters cast their ballots for Trump, according toan NBC News poll.
“Sometimes I understand their fears and why they’re Republican, I never want to be ignorant to the things that they went through in Cuba,” she said. “But this is the country that I live in now, and I had the privilege to grow up here and learn what I have learned. We have different experiences.”
Like many college students, Noriega is still living at home, priced out of Miami’s increasingly expensive housing market. She’s watched the city’s coral reefs deteriorate and remembers her parents’ struggles to build a life in the U.S. after immigrating.
She says these experiences have shaped her priorities and when she enters a voting booth in November they’ll be at the forefront of her mind.
At home, Noriega tends to steer clear of political talk, especially when the conversation veers toward two particularly fraught subjects, Trump and climate change.
“We can just never talk about it like normal people,” she said. “I get so heated.”
Noriega says the little common ground they’ve been able to find is their opposition to the ICE raids sweeping the country. As of April this year, nearly 8,000 Cuban nationals had been deported from the U.S. since Trump returned to office, according to ICE data. Many were sent to Mexico, on the other side of the border.
But she hopes to bridge the political divide at home on another issue particularly close to her heart: protecting the environment.
Noriega’s fascination with the ocean began in childhood, on beach trips from South Beach to the Keys with her mother, boating with her father and frequent visits to local aquariums. The salty waters of the Atlantic were her playground and became her family’s livelihood.
Her father works as a fisherman, supplying his catch to restaurants across South Florida.
And now, through a partnership between the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science and Miami Dade College, Noriega completed an internship in September, where she researched coral reefs and King Mackerel populations.
“It’s kind of devastating that a lot of people don’t care about the ocean,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know how important caring for our environment really is.”
The Trump administration has pursued an aggressive rollback of environmental protections, arguing that loosening regulations will boost energy production and commercial industries.
In September, the administration repealed most of the federal greenhouse gas requirements for power plants, easing restrictions on emissions from fossil fuel-fired facilities. It has also moved to weaken protections for endangered species, raising concerns about the potential consequences for wildlife, including the Florida panther.
And in June, Trump reopened hundreds of thousands of square miles of protected Pacific waters to commercial fishing, a move the administration says will expand economic opportunities for the fishing industry.
Noriega credits her parents with instilling in her a deep respect for the planet.
“They inspired me to care this much about the ocean and about my environment,” she said. “My dad told me that when he was in Cuba, he wanted to be a marine biologist. He obviously never got the chance to because it’s not like that over there.”
And as she carries the torch for her father’s unfulfilled dream, Noriega hopes to turn that shared love of the ocean into a future dedicated to protecting it.
“I just want my dad to be impressed and to feel like he brought me over here and I made it worthwhile,” she said.
She knows her first vote may not be the choice her family would choose. She understands there are still political conversations she would rather avoid with her family, and that they may continue to disagree on issues.
But she also sees her vote as another expression of the freedom her parents came to the U.S. seeking.
“I’m doing this partly because of them,” she said. “I remember all of their struggles, and I just want to make them proud.”
The story was originally published by Caplin News, a publication of FIU's Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media, as part of an editorial content partnership with the WLRN newsroom.
