Politics
Christian Ulvert: The freedoms my family fled to find are ours to protect this election
My late grandmother fled Nicaragua when Daniel Ortega — a dictator still in power today — stripped away the freedoms she had always known. She didn’t leave in search of a better life; she fled to protect the one she had. Years later, my husband’s family made its own escape from Venezuela.
Two families, two countries, one lesson passed down at our kitchen tables: Freedom is not a birthright you inherit. It is a promise you keep.
I grew up in Fontainebleau, in a neighborhood of working families where parents held down two jobs and still showed up to every school play. I went through Miami-Dade’s public schools and earned a service scholarship to Florida State University. My story is not unique. Walk down any street in our county, and you’ll find someone whose parents or grandparents arrived with little more than a suitcase and a belief that America would keep its word.
That word was simple. Your voice matters. Your vote counts. No one man gets to decide your future for you.
The strongmen my family fled understood exactly how dangerous that promise was, which is why they worked so hard to break it. They silenced newspapers. They punished dissent. They decided that power belonged to a few people and that everyone else should be grateful for whatever was left. My grandmother knew the fear of a knock on the door at night. I never have, and I intend to keep it that way for the children in my family and yours.
As this election approaches, I keep coming back to three words that have become political talking points when they should be shared American values: faith, family and freedom. They don’t belong to one party, one ideology or one kind of family. They belong to all of us.
Faith, for me, starts with a commandment I learned as a child: Love your neighbor. Not tolerate. Not judge. Love. My faith asks me to see the dignity in the person across the aisle, across the street and across the border. It does not ask me to write laws that declare my neighbors worth less than I am.
Family is where that faith becomes real. More than a decade ago, my husband and I stood up to challenge our own state’s constitution because it said families like ours didn’t count.
We didn’t win because history bends toward justice on its own. We won because ordinary people organized, showed up and refused to accept “no” as the final answer.
Cada familia merece ser protegida. Every family deserves to be protected, not only the ones that fit someone else’s picture of what a family should look like. Today, as families across our community live in fear of being separated, detained or torn from the lives they’ve built, that promise matters more than ever.
And freedom, the real kind, is what ties the other two together. The freedom to worship how you choose, or not at all. The freedom to marry the person you love. The freedom to speak your mind without looking over your shoulder. The freedom to cast a ballot and know it will be counted. These aren’t abstractions to families like mine. They are the reason we are here.
I know that people of good faith see these issues differently, and I don’t question anyone’s love for their family or their country. But I also know how freedom is lost. It rarely disappears all at once. It erodes, one exception at a time, while people tell themselves it can’t happen here. My grandmother believed it couldn’t happen in Nicaragua — until it did.
So when I think about what’s at stake this year, I don’t think about slogans or party labels. I think about my family. I think about yours. I think about the kind of Miami-Dade our children will inherit, and whether it will still be a place where people fleeing tyranny can find what my grandmother found: a community that protects the dignity of every person in it.
We have done hard things before. This community has elected leaders who once seemed impossible, welcomed generations of newcomers who rebuilt their lives from nothing, and turned the pain of exile into a fierce devotion to democracy.
That devotion is our inheritance. Now it’s our responsibility.
This election, show up. Bring your neighbor. Vote as though your family’s freedom depends on it, because for many of us, it once did.
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Christian Ulvert is the founder and president of EDGE Communications and a Florida political strategist, serving as a senior adviser and lead strategist for campaigns across Florida, including Biden for President in 2020, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins, Palm Beach County state attorneys Katherine Fernandez Rundle and Alexcia Cox, state Sens. Lauren Book and Shevrin Jones, and state Reps. Ashley Gantt, Allison Tant and many more.
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