But the focus of this city’s freedom-loving fervor has recently moved farther south.
Venezuela, not Cuba, now dominates Miami’s political conversation. Venezuelans in the city have gathered for demonstrations to coincide with protests back home. Even the Miami-Dade County Commission, a local body with no control over foreign policy, voted unanimously to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.
The shift has been coming on gradually for years, but it has accelerated in recent weeks as Venezuela has sunk further into crisis and its leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, has clung defiantly to power. The showdown in Caracas is reshaping Latino politics in South Florida, home to the highest concentration of Venezuelans in the United States.
The change is not a mere demographic curiosity. In Florida, where major elections have repeatedly been decided by tiny margins, an inflection point around Venezuela’s leadership could help define a generation of Venezuelan-American voters, who number in the tens of thousands in this state. President Donald Trump is pushing Maduro to step aside, and if he succeeds, Democrats fear it could transform Venezuelan-Americans into loyal Republicans, much like Cuban-Americans.
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“This could be Bay of Pigs 2.0,” said Liz Alarcón, a Venezuelan-American Democrat, referring to the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961 that failed to overthrow Fidel Castro. The raid turned into a disaster, in part because President John F. Kennedy’s government did not provide sufficient air support to the Cuban exiles who made up the bulk of the invading force — and Florida’s Cuban community turned against both Kennedy and the Democratic Party.
“It is very dangerous territory for Democrats,” state Sen. Annette Taddeo of Miami, a Colombian-American and a Democrat, said of her party’s handling of the Venezuela issue. “Republicans are very smart about working on the margins. They know that a state like Florida is usually decided by 1 percent or less, so all they need are enough of the Venezuelans, enough of the Colombians, enough of the Puerto Ricans.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.