THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 23
tion. The main topic of conversation, as
on all South Florida Spanish-language
stations, is the situation in Venezuela.
Pérez bought a slot on Actualidad, for
four hundred and twenty-five dollars,
and hired a Venezuelan-American host,
creating a news show with a progressive
bent, called “Democracia al Día,” which
airs every Saturday at noon.
The key to targeting voters in South
Florida, Pérez told me, was understand-
ing the fault lines within the diaspora
communities. “If you tell me when you
got to this country, I’ll tell you what your
socioeconomic background is,” she said.
“If you have money, you can get visas.
If you don’t, you need T.P.S. or asylum.”
When Pérez arrived, she stayed with
extended family who’d been there for
more than a decade and had a house in
a gated community. People who have ar-
rived in the past five years, by contrast,
often live together in subdivided apart-
ments, doing odd jobs to pay the rent.
“Take a Lyft or an Uber—all the drivers
are Venezuelans,” she said. There’s been
a similar evolution among Cubans. The
island’s economy has cratered in the past
few decades, and recent immigrants to
the U.S., who are poorer than their pre-
decessors, are fleeing a different place.
Rodríguez told me, “It’s hard for some
members of the Old Guard to claim to
be leaders of the Cuban community,
given how out of touch they are with
the people coming now.” This was one
reason that Pérez was so
frustrated with the Dem-
ocratic Presidential candi-
dates who came to Miami
and talked about immi-
gration without address-
ing local particularities:
they were missing a his-
toric opportunity to break
the Republican grip on the
leadership of South Flor-
ida’s diaspora communities.
“Whether you came here twenty years
ago or one year ago,” she said, “one of
the things that unites everyone is what’s
happening in Venezuela.”
Democrats in South Florida have at-
tacked the Trump Administration for
championing Venezuelans in Venezuela
but ignoring them once they arrive in
the United States. For all the current
political parallels between Venezuela and
Cuba, immigration policy has been aministration officials, Rubio also tried,
but failed, to get the President to replace
the acting Assistant Secretary of State
for Western Hemisphere Affairs. “Rubio
can’t control the Holy Trinity on Latin
America policy in Washington,” another
former State Department official said.
“But he gets two out of three. He gets
the Father and the Holy Ghost.” The
effect was to create an echo chamber, in
which the Administration convinced it-
self that Maduro’s fall was imminent.
“This was the product of a small group
of people who are being fed informa-
tion from members of the Venezuelan
diaspora,” the official told me.
T
he headquarters of Actualidad Radio,
an AM station started by Cuban
and Venezuelan businessmen thirteen
years ago, occupies a peach-colored build-
ing fringed with palm trees, on a quiet
street off the freeway in Doral. One af-
ternoon in late June, I arrived there with
Luisana Pérez, who handles Latino out-
reach for Florida’s Democratic Party.
Pérez, who is thirty-two years old, came
to the U.S. from Venezuela in 2011, after
becoming engaged to a U.S. citizen, the
son of a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. She
volunteered at the Florida Immigrant
Coalition, in Miami, on a campaign to
persuade the state legislature to grant
driver’s licenses to the undocumented;
that led to a job in the office of a Dem-
ocratic state senator named José Javier
Rodríguez, a Cuban-American with a
law practice in Coral Gables.
A few months before Pérez and I met,
the Florida Democratic Party had held
a meeting in Fort Lauderdale to dis-
cuss plans for 2020, and she was given an
eighty-thousand-dollar budget to begin
outreach. “When I started with J.J.R.”—
José Javier Rodríguez—“he was very ac-
tive on the radio, and I started to realize
how important it was for a state repre-
sentative to be on the radio,” she told me.
Univision and Telemundo are popular in
South Florida, but AM radio is a dias-
pora staple. There’s Radio Mambí, the
Cuban-American heir to La Cubanísima,
the famous anti-Castro station, and the
Colombian station Caracol. Amandi,
the pollster, told me that Actualidad is
“the command center of the Venezuelan
community.” It has a distinctly Venezue-
lan format: improvised and loosely struc-
tured, with frequent audience participa-
point of conspicuous divergence. Cu-
bans have historically enjoyed a singu-
lar set of immigration benefits. In 1966,
the Cuban Adjustment Act allowed Cu-
bans to apply for permanent residency
on an expedited basis—after a year and
a day in the U.S. Beginning in 1995,
through a policy called “wet foot, dry
foot,” Cubans who had reached U.S. soil
were guaranteed legal status. Venezue-
lans’ request for T.P.S. is comparatively
modest. Nevertheless, Trump still re-
fuses to grant it, despite appeals from
Rubio and Guaidó. “The Republican
Party is going from a conservative party
to a nationalist party,” Rodríguez said.
“It’s not the party of Reagan that’s going
full bore anti-immigrant.”
In an e-mail obtained by the Wa l l
Street Journal, Elliott Abrams, the Ad-
ministration’s special envoy to Venezu-
ela, warned the N.S.C. that the U.S.
would become a “laughingstock” if it de-
ported Venezuelans while fighting the
Maduro regime. “We have absolutely
got to avoid any noncriminal deporta-
tions while we sort it out,” he wrote.
Claver-Carone tersely replied that any
form of relief for Venezuelan refugees
would send the message that Maduro
might not fall anytime soon, and added
that “it opens up inconsistencies” with
the Administration’s immigration agenda.
Since 2016, there’s been an eighty-four-
per-cent increase in the deportation of
Venezuelans and a six-hundred-and-
twenty-per-cent increase in
the deportation of Cubans.
Still, not all Venezuelan
immigrants regard Trump’s
agenda as an affront. “The
Venezuelans here do not
see themselves as undoc-
umented,” Pérez told me.
“They think of the undoc-
umented as the Guatema-
lans, the Central Ameri-
cans. There’s a reluctance
in the community to identify as immi-
grants.” Rafael Fernandez said that Ven-
ezuelans in Doral saw the latest waves
of refugees as a Venezuelan political issue,
rather than as part of the immigration
wars in America. “Their stance on ille-
gal immigration is tough,” he said.
A few days before Trump announced
that “millions” of people would be ar-
rested in a series of national immigration
raids, DeSantis signed a bill to increase