Rep. Paul Ryan during an August campaign stop. (Flickr/Creative Commons)

First up: a stop in Little Havana, a neighborhood in Miami, Fla., with a significant Cuban population. While there, CNN reported Ryan hammered on running mate Mitt Romney's promise for a tough policy on the Castro regime if elected. 

"We will not keep practicing this policy of appeasement," he told a crowd at the restaurant Versailles, criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of Cuban-American relations so far. "We will be tough on this brutal dictator. All it has done is it rewarded more despotism."

From CNN: 

The 14-year congressman from Wisconsin said he learned about Cuba policy from fellow Republican lawmakers who appeared with him in Little Havana, including Florida Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

"I learned from these friends, from Mario, from Lincoln, from Ileana, just how brutal the Castro regime is, just how this president's policy of appeasement is not working. They've given me a great education, lots of us in Congress, about how we need to clamp down on the Castro regime, "Ryan said.

Jen Psaki, press secretary for the Obama reelection campaign, responded to Ryan's comments Saturday, telling reporters the administration had "repeatedly renewed the trade regime with Cuba" and had "pressured the Castro regime to give its people more say in their own future." 

Psaki brought the issue back to immigration, saying "Keeping these families apart would do nothing to weaken the Castro regime… That's what the Romney-Ryan ticket wants to do—they need to explain to the hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans who've been reunited with their families why they want to keep them apart."

Read more about the candidates' battle for Florida here.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joined Ryan for the appearance, a favor he hasn't yet bestowed on Romney. CNN pointed out Bush didn't endorse Romney until after the Florida primary, but had blandly positive things to say about the presidential hopeful. 

"Family matters a lot for all of us, and a guy can't be that bad when he's got a beautiful wife, great kids. He loves his family more than anybody could ever describe. That is what we need in the White House," Bush said when he was introduced by Craig Romney, Romney's youngest son who is also bilingual.

As the politicians worked the room, Bush said he believed Republicans were going to carry the crucial battleground state.

"I feel good. I think Romney is going to carry Florida," he said.

But as The New York Times pointed out, his second-in-command might be something of a hindrance. Ryan supported ending the trade embargo with Cuba —an incredibly unpopular move with Republicans and Cuban exiles in Florida. 

During a 2002 interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Ryan said, "If we think engagement works well with China, well, it ought to work well with Cuba… The embargo doesn't work. It is a failed policy." He went onto say of the Cuban-American embargo supporters, "I just don't agree with them and never have."

From the Times:

An aide said Mr. Ryan’s evolution was not hard to understand: when he began in Congress he considered the issue primarily through the prism of constituents in southern Wisconsin who worried about export markets for agricultural products. But gradually, the aide said, Mr. Ryan’s views evolved to consider more heavily the embargo’s national security implications, and that he has explicitly supported the embargo for the past five years.

Ryan moved to Orlando next, addressing a crowd of 2,000 at the University of Central Florida.

As he had in Miami, Mr. Ryan also began with a particularly local appeal to voters, arguing that the Romney-Ryan ticket would be better than the Obama administration for space exploration, long an economic driver in central and eastern Florida. (The Obama campaign quickly issued a statement asserting that Mr. Ryan repeatedly voted against NASA funding and that Romney-Ryan budget cuts could trim space-exploration financing by 19 percent.)

Using PowerPoint slides projected onto the wall of the arena, and with a national debt clock ticking behind him, Mr. Ryan put on a tutorial embraced by the crowd about the dangers of the national debt and government spending. “We can’t afford four more years of the last four years,” he said.

Because if anything gets a crowd riled up, it's a PowerPoint presentation.

The buzzworthiest comments came toward the end of his talk, when Ryan addressed Obama's lamenting the challenges of changing Washington from the inside.

"Don't we send presidents to Washington to change Washington, to fix the mess in Washington?" he said. "When President Obama admits that he cannot change Washington, then we need to change presidents."

Those comments came during Obama's Thursday appearance on Univision, another appeal for the Latino vote.

So who's got the upper hand? Though both candidates took some heat on Twitter, polls show Obama way ahead at this point in the race. 

[View the story "Over It: Twitter Responds To Candidates' Latino Appeals " on Storify]

Read more of Neon Tommy's election coverage here.

Reach Executive Producer Catherine Green here. Follow her here.