Herman Cain: ‘How do you say ‘delicious’ in Cuban?’ [Video]

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain again failed to demonstrate command of a foreign policy topic Wednesday as he courted Cuban conservatives in southern Florida.

Asked by Miami Herald reporter Marc Caputo what he thinks of the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy that allows Cubans who reach U.S. soil to stay, Cain was stumped.

“The wet-foot, dry-foot policy?” Cain asked, as if he had never heard of it.

“Yeah,” Caputo replied, but he got no response from Cain before the conversation was cut off by a campaign aide.

When asked at an earlier event about his position on Cuba, Cain replied: “One of my principles is, go to the source closest to the problem, you will find the solution,” Cain said. “…I want to get from Cuban leaders a solution for what we should do.”

Cain, who declares in his stump speech that the country is suffering from a “foggy foreign policy crisis,” ran into trouble earlier this week when he fumbled a question -- “So you agreed with President Obama on Libya?” -- posed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Cain seemed puzzled by the question and eventually said he had “all this stuff twirling around in my head.”

The former pizza chain executive who markets himself as “a businessman, not a politician,” told a crowd gathered at Versailles restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood that he wants “freedom for Cuba now!” but stopped short of denouncing Cuba’s communist government, according to a Reuters report.

Asked by a reporter what he thought of Obama’s policy to ease travel restrictions to Cuba, Cain dismissed the inquiry as a “gotcha question.”

But it was a question of Cain’s own that got him into trouble as he sipped Cuban-style coffee and sampled a croqueta while surrounded by cameras at the Versailles event.>

“How do you say ‘delicious’ in Cuban?” he asked.

kim.geiger@latimes.com