nity, Andrade said, had closely followed
recent Presidential elections in Colom-
bia, in which a right-wing candidate,
Iván Duque, won by demonizing the
previous government’s peace accords
with Marxist rebels. When Duque as-
sumed office, in August, Scott was on
hand for the inauguration, and appeared
on Univision, which broadcast the event
in Florida. Andrade said, “We saw that
as an election that came down to a choice
between socialist and non-socialist. The
takeaway, in the governor’s race, was that
Gillum was the socialist.”
Similar appeals to Nicaraguans were
reinforced by events in Nicaragua, where
Daniel Ortega, the country’s strongman
President, has repressed dissent and bru-
talized opponents. One pro-DeSantis
mailer added Gillum to a lineup of Latin-
American socialist authoritarians, from
Maduro to Ortega and Raúl Castro.
I
n 1983, when Ronald Reagan travelled
to Little Havana for a rally, Al Carde-
nas, his state campaign chair, told the
Times, “If you were running for Presi-
dent in a Latin-American country, I
don’t think you could fit the profile any
better.” The same could be said of Trump.
Between his daily fulminations against
the press and his fondness for campaign
pageantry, there’s something of the trop-
ical caudillo about him. And, as the
G.O.P. has morphed into the party of
Trump, a small group of Florida Repub-
licans have helped him boost his image
with the state’s Latino electorate. Rep-
resentatives Mario Díaz-Balart, Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, and Carlos Curbelo have
deep ties to the Cuban community. Rick
Scott has offered advice: in November,
2016, after Fidel Castro died, Trump, as
President-elect, called Scott to ask what
he should say. Most helpful of all is Rubio,
who is known both for his interest in
Latin-American policy and for his ten-
dency to view the region through the
lens of Cuban-American relations. “He
knows a lot,” a former White House
official who worked with Rubio told me.
“But what’s good for Cuban-Americans
isn’t always what’s good for America.”
When Rubio and Trump were run-
ning for President, they were contentious
opponents: Rubio was “Little Marco”;
Trump was a “con artist.” But that changed
in early 2017, when Trump was trying to
secure support in the Senate to repeal
Obamacare, and Rubio was a swing vote.
Rubio, for his part, wanted to be the Party ’s
lead policymaker on Latin America.
If Trump had any real interest in
Cuba, it was as a business opportunity
and a political staging ground. In 1998,
he sent a group of investment advisers
to the country on his behalf—in viola-
tion of the U.S. embargo. The follow-
ing year, when he was considering run-
ning for President, he gave a speech in
Miami vowing never to do business in
Cuba while Fidel Castro was in power.
One former White House official told
me that, by 2017, “the instructions were
‘Make Rubio happy.’ The President
didn’t care about Cuba at all, so it wasn’t
a big thing for him.”
The White House set a deadline of
the summer of 2017 to reverse Obama’s
Cuba policy, and Rubio took the lead,
working with officials at the National
Security Council, as well as other Flor-
ida Republicans. At one point, after re-
peatedly failing to get meetings with
the President, representatives from Ken-
tucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas,
and Texas—states that exported goods
to Cuba, and didn’t want White House
policy to block trade with the country—
became upset. “They said to us, ‘This is
bullshit,’” a White House official told
me. “‘ We are Trump country. Why is
the President only talking to Rubio and
Díaz-Balart? We represent more votes
than they do!’” But the Administra-
tion—and the Florida Republicans—
saw the congressmen’s business-minded
pragmatism as insufficiently hard-line.
On June 16, 2017, at a ceremony in Lit-
tle Havana, with Rubio as the m.c. and
the Florida Republican delegation in at-
tendance, Trump claimed to be “cancel-
ling the last Administration’s completely
one-sided deal with Cuba.” The presen-
tation was a greatest hits of anti-Castro
invective, featuring a violin performance
of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and hom-
ages to veterans of the Bay of Pigs. None-
theless, the plan left most of Obama’s
policy intact: embassies remained open;
direct commercial flights and cruises con-
tinued; Americans could still send un-
limited remittances. “This was domes-
tic electoral politics, not foreign policy,”
the second White House official told
me. Returning to Washington on Air
Force One, Trump said, “We’re done. I
won. We did what we needed to do. I
said I’d undo Obama’s policy, and I did.”
A few months later, as the Cuban-
American community in Miami learned
the details of Trump’s policy, Rubio,
who, according to two White House
officials, had been involved in drafting
the policy, now lambasted it as the work
of the deep state. “Bureaucrats in the
State Department who oppose the Pres-
ident’s Cuba policy refused to fully im-
plement it,” he said, in a statement issued
just five hours after the final regulations
were published. But, by then, Trump
had shifted his focus to Venezuela.
In May, while the White House had
“We prefer our idea people to present their ideas during office hours.”
• •
THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 21
