United States belligerence in South America is at a new high, with the launch of military strikes and the seizure of an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, followed by President Trump’s order Tuesday for a “complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers going to or from that country. The moves mark a distinct shift in regional foreign policy from the anti-interventionism of recent decades.
But for one cohort in South Florida, this is just what they have been waiting for. Washington’s new activism brandishes the U.S. presence and policies that Cuban Americans here have supported since fleeing their country following the arrival of Fidel Castro and his communist plans in 1959. To many, it stems from having one of their own, Cuban-immigrant-raised Marco Rubio, at the helm of U.S. international affairs.
“That’s our boy,” says Lorena Cabrera, walking her two small dogs through the Cuban Memorial Park in Little Havana on a recent afternoon. She is referring to Mr. Rubio, who is serving as both secretary of state and interim national security adviser, and who many see as the central force behind the Trump administration’s hard line stance in Latin America this year.
Why We Wrote This
The Trump administration’s more aggressive approach to Latin America is welcomed by many in the Cuban diaspora. They see one of their own – Secretary of State Marco Rubio – as an architect of the shift that, for them, has been a long time coming.
The Cold War ended 35 years ago, and U.S. foreign policy – no longer consumed by the communist threat – shifted to a focus on terrorism and drug trafficking. However, for many on the political right in Latin America, and within the Cuban diaspora in South Florida, the danger of communism never went away. Mr. Rubio’s rise has given broader reach to the Cuban diaspora’s worldview, shaped by a historic loss of freedom, community, property, and human rights in their homeland.
“The U.S.’s new philosophy on foreign affairs reflects the perspectives of most of us inside the Cuban American community: To end the regime in Venezuela … and of course, the one in Cuba,” says Miguel Cossio, chief operating officer of the American Museum of The Cuban Diaspora in Miami.
For Rubio, an anti-Castro dream
The click-clack and swirling sounds of dominos being mixed together on a table before a fresh round of play fills Little Havana’s Domino Park in early December. Despite posted rules that prohibit yelling and using malas palabras, or bad words, one quartet breaks both codes of conduct within moments of sitting down together, quickly dissolving into hugs and laughter.
“Faced with a life experience of pain, Cubans are a very joyous people,” says Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, co-founder and spokesperson for the Cuban Democratic Directorate, which promotes democracy and human rights in Cuba. “There’s sorrow in being lost and disconnected from Cuba, our land. But man, we’ll find a good time anywhere,” says Mr. Gutiérrez-Boronat, whose family fled in 1971, when he was 5 years old.
He describes the mindset of the Cuban diaspora in South Florida, with all the caveats that come with a 2 million-strong population, as patriotic, focused on family unity, prioritizing individual autonomy and freedom, thinking independently, and cherishing democracy.
In the 1950s, when the Castro brothers led a guerrilla campaign to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista, many in Cuba believed the struggle would return the island to democracy. But Fidel Castro and his supporters soon began carrying out indiscriminate arrests and executions, seizing private property and assets, and turning to the Soviet Union for financial aid.
Mr. Rubio’s parents left Cuba in 1956, and he was born in Miami in 1971. Like many youngsters raised in South Florida by Cuban-born parents, Mr. Rubio grew up hearing how communism had destroyed lives there, and how the United States was uniquely positioned to bring about freedom on the island. As a child, he dreamed of leading an army of Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro regime, he wrote in “An American Son: A Memoir,” published in 2012.
Mr. Rubio rose up politically in South Florida, working for the first Cuban American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and eventually winning election to the Florida House in 1999.
His decision last January to put the Cuban regime back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the seizure of a Cuba-bound oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela earlier this month, illustrate Mr. Rubio’s espousal of the diaspora’s worldview, locals say.
“He understands what a communist regime is and the damage it can cause,” says Mr. Cossio. “We’re witnessing a philosophical shift in foreign policy.”
An ‘iconic’ regime
The Cold War, which lasted from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, led to an ideological tug of war in Latin America between U.S.-backed anticommunism efforts and Soviet-supported leftist movements. The U.S. backed military coups in Guatemala and Chile, and supported authoritarian military dictatorships that saw leftist citizens as the enemy.
For the United States, a central threat was the prospect that communism could gain a foothold in its backyard, says William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University in Washington. “Apart from Cuba itself, pretty much all of what the U.S. saw as threats in the region went away” with the end of the Cold War, he says. And so too did Washington’s focus on the region.
But in 1998, members of the Cuban diaspora watched keenly as a bombastic former paratrooper was elected president of Venezuela, promising a new economic system that would forge a path between capitalism and communism. President Hugo Chávez’s victory ushered in what was dubbed the “Pink Tide” of leftist, populist leaders across the region who promised an end to elitist politics.
The political opposition in places like Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina saw communism in these leftist victories. Most of these democratically-elected leftists explicitly praised or had close ties with the Castro regime in Cuba.
“The regime in Cuba is iconic to the left,” says Mr. Gutiérrez-Boronat.
The U.S. mostly stayed on the sidelines.
Converging on Venezuela
Today, from Mexico to Chile, it is common for leftist political candidates to be labeled communists by their opponents. Electorally, it’s “very, very effective,” says Dr. LeoGrande.
What appears to be shifting, however, is Washington’s readiness to adopt a similar outlook. President Donald Trump stepped into the fray of Honduras’s November presidential election to call the front-runner a “borderline communist,” and he referred to New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as a “100% Communist Lunatic” the same month. In Florida, the state government introduced a new curriculum to teach the risks and realities of communism in public schools.
Anastasios Kamoutsas, the Florida commissioner of education, expects other school districts in the country to adopt something similar. “What Mamdani is pushing is very similar to what Fidel Castro was pushing in communist Cuba. It’s important that our students understand these policies and where they can end up,” he says.
Mr. Trump’s new National Security Strategy places the U.S.’s geopolitical focus squarely on the Americas. It frames Latin America as the source of some of the United States’ most serious problems – drug trafficking, immigration, Chinese investment – and calls on the region as a whole to work toward U.S. goals.
In oil-rich Venezuela, all of these interests come together. And since September, the United States has stepped up its military pressure, blowing alleged drug-running boats out of the water and deploying the world’s largest aircraft carrier, in an effort to remove from power authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Chávez’s successor. Washington says it is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels, but the legality of its strikes is in question.
“Why are people asking if it’s legal? Bomb them,” says Adela Diez outside a coffee window on Little Havana’s Calle Ocho earlier this month, referring to the 25 vessels the U.S. has sunk and the more than 90 people who have been killed in the Caribbean and the Pacific. “Maduro is held up by the drug money,” she says. “Maduro is holding up Cuba. They all need to fall – Marco Rubio and Donald Trump have the right idea.”
The Cuban diaspora in Florida has grown and changed since the 1960s. The children and grandchildren of exiles are further removed from the upheaval that communism brought to the island, and new arrivals do not always see eye to eye with the old guard.
But, “one thing everyone agrees on is that communism is not good,” says Guennady Rodríguez, who fled Cuba in 2013 and now runs a political podcast called “23yFlagler.”
That collective disdain for communism can translate to: ‘“In Miami, everyone is a communist.’ It just depends on who you ask,” jokes Mr. Rodríguez. In 2023, an online news site accused him of being a prop for the Cuban regime, Mr. Rodríguez recalls, for promoting a policy of engagement with Cuba as a strategy for regime change. The loudest voices in the Cuban community here prefer an isolationist approach.
When it comes to communism, “Marco Rubio uses the word frequently. South Florida Cubans use the word frequently,” says Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor at Florida International University. “It carries an agenda of us vs. them,” which is typical of current U.S. politics, he says.
José Jasán Nieves Cárdenas, who was a journalist in Cuba before his exile to the United States in 2019, finds that the resistance to communism is so strong that it serves as a conversation stopper. “Once you criticize certain mainstream ideas, you are a communist and you are banned from debate,” says Mr. Nieves, editor-in-chief of El Toque, an online independent news site serving audiences mostly in Cuba.
That concerns him, especially in this political moment.
Life experience with an extreme political movement, such as the Cuban regime, tends to push people to the opposite extreme, he says. He is not surprised that the diaspora is largely conservative and sees eye to eye with Mr. Rubio. What does surprise him, though, is that Cubans fled a ‘caudillo,’ or strongman, and now seem to defend similar behavior from the Trump administration.
Debate inside the Cuban diaspora, says Mr. Nieves, is more important than ever.
