Hispanic commentators hailed the election of Barack Obama as the beginning of a better life for the millions of Latinos struggling to carve out a path as America’s largest minority community, following their unprecedented support for the Democratic candidate in Tuesday’s historic election.

El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister paper of the Miami Herald, said Mr Obama’s victory heralded a return to “rational politics” while Univision, the largest Spanish television network, praised him as an agent of social and economic change for Americans of all backgrounds.

Laying out a “Latino agenda”, the network’s website called for speedy and comprehensive immigration reform, a solution to the economic crisis and end to the politics of fear and division – the issues that drove Hispanics away from the Republicans and into Mr Obama’s embrace in large numbers this year.

Hispanic voters have long allied themselves with the Republican party on the basis of their conservative cultural values, while it was assumed that inter-minority rivalry would leave them reticent to support an African-American for an office their own community has not yet attained. But this year, Hispanic Americans defied conventional wisdom to throw their weight behind Mr Obama, with an unprecedented 66 per cent nationwide voting for the Democratic candidate.

The phenomenon was evident even in Florida, where a large Cuban exile community has traditionally been a barrier to Democratic success. Composed primarily of anti-Castro hardliners with a lingering resentment over John F. Kennedy’s disastrous foray into the Bay of Pigs, this bloc, which once constituted almost the entire Floridian Hispanic community, has overwhelmingly voted Republican in every election for which records are available – but even here a shift has taken place.

Mr Obama’s success among Hispanic Floridians – 57 per cent of whom cast ballots for him in Tuesday’s election, compared to 42 per cent for John McCain – is in part because the make-up of the community has changed, analysts say. Cuban-Americans now account for less than a third of the state’s Latino voters, with the largest groups now coming from Mexican and Puerto Rican backgrounds, more liberal in their political tendencies.

But even in the heart of Little Havana, attitudes are changing. In Miami-Dade, where the Cuban-American presence is strongest, Mr Obama almost tied with his Republican rival, far surpassing any previous Democratic achievement in the county.

The generation which fled Fidel Castro is ebbing away, replaced by a youth less vehement in their attitudes and more open to new, liberal possibilities. According to exit polling data from Bendixen & Associates, 35 per cent of the Cuban American vote in Miami-Dade went to the Democrat – almost 10 points higher than John Kerry – a Catholic – managed in 2004.

''This is a demographic revolution happening in Miami-Dade County,'' said Fernand Amandi of Bendixen & Associates, which has long been predicting a political shift in the Hispanic community.

The generational differences are starkly delineated by Bendixen’s findings: of Cuban-Americans aged 65 and over, 84 per cent backed Mr McCain, while of those aged 29 and under, 55 per cent voted for Mr Obama.

The Pujol family, residents of Miami, are a case in point. 24-year-old Alexandra Palomo-Pujol supported Mr Obama from the outset and convinced her mother Rose, a lifelong Republican, to do the same, a conversion which horrified her grandparents, who left Cuba in 1959

''Over three generations, we grew up in completely different places and we all see things differently and it's hard to see eye-to-eye,'' Ms Palomo-Pujol, an executive assistant, told the Nuevo Herald. “It's hard not to have those differences change the most important relationships in your life.''

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