THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 19
Latin America, asserting that “all op-
tions are open,” Rafael looked at his fa-
ther, who had tears in his eyes. “Oh, my
God,” Francisco said. “It’s happening.”
Only a small percentage of the re-
cently arrived Venezuelans are eligible
to vote, but many Latin Americans in
Florida see the Venezuelan government
as the nexus of the region’s worst prob-
lems. The repressive socialist leaders in
Cuba and Nicaragua depend on Vene-
zuela for oil and for political support.
Colombia, which borders Venezuela, has
taken in more than a million refugees.
“If you solve the Venezuela problem, you
get three for the price of one,” a state
Republican operative told me. “You’ll
make the Colombians, Nicaraguans, and
Cubans in Florida very happy.”
In every Presidential election since
1992, the winner of Florida has gone
on to the White House. Trump won
the state, which has a population of
twenty-one million, by a hundred and
thirteen thousand votes. He’s since made
it the centerpiece of his reëlection effort,
launching his campaign in Orlando
and making frequent visits to South
Florida to deliver major addresses on
Cuba and Venezuela. Local politicians
call Interstate 4, which runs between
Tampa and Daytona Beach, “The road
to the White House.”
“Florida elections always come down
to margins,” Frank Mora, a professor
of politics at F.I.U., told me. The 2018
races for governor and the Senate were
each decided by less than half of a per-
centage point. In South Florida, which
has diverse and overlapping voting blocs,
candidates try to win votes in sympa-
thetic constituencies and limit the dam-
age in others. In and around Miami,
seven hundred thousand Cubans are
eligible to vote, along with a hundred
and sixty thousand Colombians, eighty
thousand Nicaraguans, and some fifty
thousand Venezuelans. “Foreign policy
is intensely local in South Florida,”
Mora said. Most of the diaspora com-
munities in the state have fled social-
ist dictatorships. Republicans, and es-
pecially Trump, have seized on this fact
to relentlessly attack left-wing popu-
lists in Central and South America.
“The Trump Administration’s Latin
America policy has become all about
Florida,” a former State Department
official told me.
Less than a week after Trump’s
speech, the White House and Guaidó,
convinced that Maduro was on the verge
of falling, attempted to deliver nearly
two hundred metric tons of food and
medicine to Venezuela by way of check-
points along the border with Brazil and
Colombia, in a push that they hoped
would break the will of Maduro’s sup-
porters. The Venezuelan military blocked
the shipments and sealed the border.
Few officers defected. In April, Guaidó
called for a military uprising—the “final
phase,” he said, of the attempt to oust
Maduro—but it never materialized. Two
months later, when Trump returned to
Florida to speak to campaign donors at
the country club he owns in Doral, the
regime was still in power. He didn’t men-
tion Venezuela.
“The situation was hot at the time
of the rally,” Rafael Fernandez told me
recently. “Now the streets are cold.” These
days, Trump’s promise of action in Ven-
ezuela rarely comes up at social gather-
ings; Rafael’s friends and family prefer
to avoid it. “‘All the options are on the
table.’ That’s what we heard, even though
they aren’t on the fucking table,” he said.
“For the Trump Administration, Plan
A was that the military would come in
and save the day,” Mora told me. “They
don’t have a Plan B or C.”
The Latino electorate is younger,
more numerous, and more diverse than
ever before, with largely progressive
views on health-care and social-justice
issues. These trends should work in
favor of the Democrats. Still, the Pres-
idential election is more than a year
away, and disaffection with Republi-
cans is hardly a guarantee of Demo-
cratic votes. Florida Democrats remain
bitterly divided over how they lost state-
wide races in 2018, and many have com-
plained that the national Party leader-
ship is not investing enough resources
in voter-outreach and registration efforts.
In an Op-Ed in the Times, Andrea Cris-
tina Mercado, the head of the progressive
group New Florida Majority, warned
that the Democrats “assume demogra-
phy is destiny and think their policies
speak for themselves.”
This spring, the President’s national-
security adviser at the time, John Bolton,
announced new sanctions against Cuba,
Venezuela, and Nicaragua, claiming that
“the troika of tyranny” was “beginningto crumble.” “If the President wins 2020,
the Venezuelan policy will have been
successful,” a former Administration
official said. “No matter how many Ven-
ezuelans are scattered to the winds.”M
eetings of the Venezuelan Amer-
ican Republican Club of Mi-
ami-Dade County begin with a recita-
tion of the Pledge of Allegiance. One
night in late June, a group of thirty peo-
ple dressed in cocktail attire stood with
their hands on their hearts in the back
room of a Cuban restaurant in Doral
which was decorated with photographs
of Old Havana. I’d been invited by the
club’s vice-president, Kennedy Bolívar.
Short and barrel-chested, Bolívar is a
former union leader in Caracas. He fled
to the U.S. in 2010, and worked in con-
struction in New York before moving
to Miami and applying for asylum. He
will become a U.S. citizen next year, in
time to vote in the 2020 elections. Bolívar
helps organize press conferences and
town-hall-style meetings for the Venezu-
elan opposition, when it visits Wash-
ington, and for the Trump Administra-
tion, when it visits Florida. He pulled
out his phone to show me photographs
of himself posing with Guaidó and
Vice-President Mike Pence. “We have
a semantic problem with Venezuelans
arriving in the U.S.,” he told me. “Peo-
ple associate Democrats with democ-
racy. We have to tell them, ‘No, there
are two parties that work within the U.S.
democratic system.’” The club’s presi-
dent, Gustavo Garagorry, added, “Trump
is the king of democracy!”
A few miles away, the Democrats
were holding the first debate of the
Presidential primaries, and the club
had asked two guests to offer a preëmp-
tive rebuttal: Luciano Suárez, the
Cuban-born, octogenarian vice-mayor
of West Miami, and David Rivera, a
Cuban-American former U.S. con-
gressman. The words of the pledge
were the only ones uttered in English
all night. Suárez, bald and bespecta-
cled, in a white guayabera, took the mi-
crophone first, playing the role of elder
statesman. “This isn’t about Florida,”
he said, as waiters distributed baskets
of fried plantains. “It’s about prevent-
ing the spread of socialism in the re-
gion. If you’ve got a friend who’s Co-
lombian, or Nicaraguan, and they say