18 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
For those who have fled dictatorships, U.S. policy on Venezuela is all-important.
THE POLITICALSCENE
SO GOES THE NATION
Who will win Florida’s Latino voters?
BYJONATHAN BLITZER
ILLUSTRATION BY TYLER COMRIE
O
ne afternoon last February, Don-
ald Trump stood at a lectern at
Florida International University, in
Miami, and before a cheering crowd
of a thousand called President Nicolás
Maduro of Venezuela a “dictator” and
a “Cuban puppet.” Trump was flanked
by two enormous flags, Venezuelan and
American, and the word Democracia
flashed on a screen behind him. Chants
in Spanish alternated between thank-
ing Trump (“We’re with you!”) and
taunting Maduro (“He’s already fallen!”).
“It was like a rock concert,” Rafael Fer-
nandez, who left Venezuela nearly two
decades ago, told me.
The Trump Administration had re-
cently instituted sanctions against Ven-
ezuela’s state oil company, which sup-
plies the overwhelming majority of the
government’s budget, and more than
fifty countries, including the U.S., now
recognized the opposition leader, Juan
Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate Pres-
ident. Trump had also floated the pos-
sibility of a military intervention. Marco
Rubio, the Republican senator from
Florida, who is influential on Latin-
American issues, claimed that high-
ranking officers in the Venezuelan mil-
itary were poised to defect. Addressing
those who weren’t, Trump warned, “You
will find no safe harbor, no easy exit,
and no way out. You’ll lose everything.”
Fernandez was in the audience with
his father, Francisco. The two argued
constantly about Trump. Rafael told me
that he was “more pro-Trump than anti.”
His father, a former Venezuelan politi-
cian, is a lifelong conservative, but when
he voted for the first time in an Amer-
ican election, in 2016, it was for Hillary
Clinton; he despised Trump.
Francisco’s sentiments were rare
among his neighbors in Doral, a small
city of strip malls and golf courses west
of Miami. There are more than two
hundred thousand Venezuelans in Flor-
ida, more than anywhere else in the
country, and the majority live in the
Doral area. Many of them are recent ar-
rivals—some four million people have
left Venezuela in the past four years, ten
per cent of the country’s population.
The exodus began after Maduro was
elected, in 2013, when, in response to
dwindling oil prices and economic mis-
management, the government tried to
stave off collapse by printing more
money. Earlier this year, with inflation
close to two million per cent, a bottle
of ketchup cost nine dollars, but a min-
imum-wage job paid about six dollars
a month. Maduro has responded to pub-
lic protests by jailing and killing dis-
senters; death squads aligned with the
government have assassinated at least
seven thousand people in the past year
and a half. Condemnation of Maduro
has been widespread in the U.S. and
other countries, but no one has de-
nounced the regime as aggressively as
Trump has. In Doral, Rafael said, “you
were a pariah if you didn’t support
Trump.”
Rafael, who is twenty-eight, man-
ages a car dealership, and he and his fa-
ther run a Web site called Bienvenidos
Venezolanos. They created it eight years
ago as an advice hub for Venezuelans
in Florida, with links to immigration
lawyers, job postings, and real-estate
listings. It’s a low-budget operation, with
a single full-time employee, but by the
end of last year, when Venezuelans were
responsible for the largest share of asy-
lum applications in American immigra-
tion courts, the site was getting five thou-
sand hits a day.
Rafael said that, at the rally, antic-
ipating Maduro’s downfall, “we were
thinking, We could be free next month.”
When Trump promised a “new day” in
