The New Yorker - USA (2019-09-23)

they’re a Democrat, take them aside
and say, ‘Listen, this is about democ­
r a c y. ’” The candidates who would be
taking the debate stage, he said, were
“socialists disguised as Democrats.”
The Republicans’ approach to Ven­
ezuelan immigrants builds on a rela­
tionship they’ve been cultivating with
Cuban­Americans since the nineteen­
sixties. Between the Cuban Revolution,
in 1959, and the mid­seventies, hundreds
of thousands of Cubans came to Florida,
fleeing the Castro regime. They thought
that they’d go home after Fidel Castro
fell, but he remained in power until he
died, in 2016, at which point he was re­
placed by his brother, Raúl. By the early
eighties, local Cuban leaders had begun
organizing voter­registration drives in
South Florida under the slogan “Vote
So That They Respect Us.” Republicans
courted them as the party of anti­Com­
munism and free enterprise. The Party
also capitalized on a history of Dem­
ocratic betrayals, typified by the Bay
of Pigs, in 1961, in which John F. Ken­
nedy sent a battalion of Cuban émigrés
to overthrow Castro—then, when the
invasion foundered, abandoned them
in order to deny American involve­
ment. “Kennedy is still the No. 2 most
hated man in Miami,” the Cuban émi­
gré Raul Masvidal said, in 1985, while
running for mayor of the city. “Castro
is of course the No. 1.” Within a decade,
nearly seventy per cent of
Cuban­ Americans were
registered Republicans.
“Venezuela is the gate­
way to the Cuban elector­
ate,” Fernand Amandi, a
Democratic pollster in
Miami, told me. Since 2000,
Venezuela has supplied
Cuba with some twenty­
one billion dollars’ worth
of oil; in return, in 2008, the
Castros began supplying Venezuela with
Cuban intelligence agents, to monitor
its military and to quell political oppo­
nents. In 2017, Maduro thanked Cuba
publicly for this assistance. “The fall of
Venezuela represents the fall of the
Cuban regime,” the Republican opera­
tive told me. “Cubans have waited their
whole lives for this. For them, Venezu­
ela is personal.”
At the meeting of the Venezuelan
American Republican Club, Rivera gave

a selective recounting of everything that

the Republican Party had done over the

years for South Florida’s Latin­ American

constituencies: In Nicaragua, Ronald

Reagan supported the Contras in their

war against the Sandinistas. George W.

Bush expanded Plan Colombia, a se­

curity­and­anti­drug initiative popular

among the country’s conservatives. And

yet, Rivera said, without the efforts of

groups such as the club he was address­

ing, it was far from assured that the

diaspora communities would remem­

ber their debts. “It’s the same with the

Venezuelan vote,” he said. “The fact

that Trump has sanctioned Diosdado

Cabello”—a member of Maduro’s inner

circle—“and that he’s elevated Guaidó.

That’s not enough.”

The Democratic candidates on the

debate stage made a point of proving

how progressive they were on immigra­

tion. With a show of hands, they sup­

ported providing medical coverage to

the undocumented and decriminaliz­

ing border crossings, proposals that fall

well to the left of past Party consensus.

Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Cory

Booker, and Julián Castro attempted

a few phrases in Spanish. (“Cervantes

would have laughed. Or cried,” the

Miami Herald wrote.) But none of them

mentioned Venezuela. Democrats in

Florida have pushed for the Trump Ad­

ministration to extend a form of legal

relief, known as Temporary

Protected Status, to some

two hundred thousand

Venezuelan refugees in the

U.S., but the President has

refused. Not a single Dem­

ocrat on the debate stage

talked about T.P.S. for Ven­

ezuelans. In the candidates’

eagerness to satisfy their

party’s progressive base on

immigration policy, they

seemed to be forgetting that one rea­

son they’d come to Florida was to ac­

tually address the state’s immigrants.

O

n a humid afternoon, I met Fabio

Andrade, a Colombian­American

Republican strategist, at a Panera Bread

in a Doral strip mall. Last year, Andrade

worked on Ron DeSantis’s successful gu­

bernatorial campaign, and he is now a

consultant for the Republican Party on

Latino outreach. In 2018, across Miami­

Dade County, DeSantis and his prede­

cessor, Rick Scott, who ran for Senate,

outperformed Trump, mostly because

of their strong showing among Cuban­

Americans; turnout among previously

registered voters, who are often older and

more likely to vote Republican, outpaced

new registrations. Andrade told me that

older Cuban­Americans had been at the

center of DeSantis’s strategy in Miami­

Dade, where he won seventy per cent of

the Cuban vote. According to polling by

a team at F.I.U., Cuban­ Americans who

came to the U.S. before 1980 supported

DeSantis over his Democratic opponent,

Andrew Gillum, by a margin of eighty­

four per cent to fifteen per cent; those

who were born in the U.S. supported him

by a margin of only fifty­ one per cent to

forty­eight per cent. (DeSantis won over

all by four­tenths of a percentage point.)

DeSantis played on older Cubans’ re­

sentment of President Obama, who, in

2014, began the process of normalizing

relations with Cuba and, two years later,

visited the country and appeared along­

side Raúl Castro, making him the first

sitting American President to set foot on

the island since the nineteen­twenties.

“For Cubans, our message was that we

had to return to the way things were be­

fore Obama,” another Republican strate­

gist told me. New generations of Cuban­

Americans have grown less interested in

Cuba policy, which has dropped below the

economy, health care, and gun control in

its importance to the Cuban­American

electorate as a whole. While the com­

munity is still mostly Republican, younger

Cuban­Americans identify less strongly

with the G.O.P. The Venezuela issue, the

strategist added, galvanized older Cuban­

American voters, whose turnout had be­

come more important than ever.

Andrade walked me through the mes­

sages for other communities. Puerto Ri­

cans, he said, were primarily concerned

with the territory’s achieving statehood.

The national Republican leadership

tends to reject this idea, but during the

campaign DeSantis claimed to support

it, in addition to immediate measures

to insure the territory’s sovereignty. On

the campaign trail, Scott, who had trav­

elled to Puerto Rico at least eight times

as governor, emphasized the idea of rep­

resentation, stressing the line “I’m going

to be your senator.”

The Colombian­American commu­

20 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019