Nikki Whiting

By Andrew Meacham

In some ways, Nikki Whiting was born ready. Her Cuban American family has experienced both political repression and a hard-won prosperity. In her 30 years, she has studied hard, chosen carefully and stayed current with world events in the face of fragmenting economies abroad and divisions at home. She has proven an adept learner and a clear speaker, traits that have led to at least two large steps upward, most recently to her role as Communications Director for the Florida Department of Health.

Being chief spokeswoman for such a critical Department with COVID-19 still afoot does not intimidate her. Neither did the duties of her previous job, which included advising Lt. Governor Jeanette Nuñez on issues related to the Western Hemisphere and their impact on the state.

“I always come with the attitude of, you know, ‘Put me in, coach,’” Whiting said.

Those coaches have been quick to oblige, starting with U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban American elected to Congress. Whiting interned for Ros-Lehtinen on her way to earning a bachelor’s in English at the University of Florida. She returned for two additional years, this time on Capitol Hill, working as Ros-Lehtinen’s legislative assistant and Press Secretary.

“I had an absolute ball,” Whiting said of the popular Republican, who had chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee and easily won re-election in a predominantly Democratic district. “Ileana was the most enthusiastic member of Congress. She approached everything with enthusiasm, whether on foreign affairs or talking to a constituent. It was a lot of fun just standing alongside her and amplifying what she was doing.”

In 2017, Ros-Lehtinen announced she would retire after 38 years in legislative service. Whiting stayed on, but in the meantime enrolled in a graduate public administration program at the University of Miami. By January 2019, she was midway to a master’s degree and handling communications for Esteban Bovo, a Miami-Dade County Commissioner.

“It was a fun two years,” Whiting said. “He was a man of the people, with blue collar values and a servant’s heart.”

Bovo entered the Miami-Dade County mayoral race in 2020 and lost. “I was devastated,” Whiting said. But before long, another opportunity surfaced. It always seemed to work that way, that even a tough loss hid something else just ahead, something better than she could have planned.

Her family history and that of Miami’s Cuban community had prepared her for deeper disappointments. Whiting’s mother had a good relationship with her own father, a police officer in Cuba. But she didn’t get to grow up with him. Authorities arrested him shortly after Whiting’s mother was born in Miami in 1960 on charges of plotting against Castro’s government. He remained imprisoned for 20 years while her maternal grandmother played the piano and sang to make ends meet.

“My mom didn’t meet him until she was 20 or 21,” Whiting said. “It’s those stories that motivate me to preserve the freedom that we have, and advocate for it as well.”

As a child, she was mesmerized by the monthslong standoff over 7-yearold Elian Gonzalez, whose mother had drowned in the migration from Cuba and whose father wanted custody. Nikki was just a year older than the boy, almost to the day.

“I said, ‘Mom, who is that lady going to Elian’s house and playing with him?’” she said. “She was like, ‘Oh, that’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’. That was really kind of the transformative moment, weirdly enough, when I put it into perspective.”

Whiting is quick to note enormous variety within Hispanic populations. Still, she saw Hispanic voters moving toward the GOP before pollsters did.

“I saw Miami-Dade County was always going to turn,” she said. “No one owns any voting bloc or should ever get complacent about it.”

Meanwhile, no sooner had her candidate lost that county’s mayoral race in a runoff before a plum opportunity showed up. Whiting gained much from her two years as senior adviser to Nuñez, the Lieutenant Governor, who she admired because “faith, family and freedom are the values that inform her life and have made her who she is.”

Stephanie Smith, a TECO Energy vice president of state and regional affairs, saw the way Whiting absorbed the demands of that position and performed at a high level.

“She is extremely savvy when it comes to the political process,” Smith said. “She is a fiercely loyal person, very strong in her convictions. She is very well read, very smart. She does her homework and just carries herself on a different level.”

That kind of talent would likely carry Whiting much further, Smith figured. It already has.