Florida’s Cuban – After a Venezuelan earthquake, President Donald Trump shifted from claims of control to sending disaster assistance to “friends,” while U.S. commands promoted aid even as boat strikes contributed to extrajudicial killings. A new report argues the real driver b
When a devastating earthquake hit Venezuela last week. President Donald Trump stepped back from earlier claims that he was “in charge” of the country he invaded in January. Instead of promising reconstruction or support as a matter of obligation. the White House opted for disaster assistance aimed at U.S. “friends.”.
That shift played out as the U.S. Southern Command accelerated its own messaging from across the region. This week. SOUTHCOM posted furiously on X about providing “disaster assistance to the people of Venezuela.” The posts marked a contrast with SOUTHCOM’s now-standard social media content. including videos showing murder of Venezuelans on boats in the Caribbean—along with Colombians and others killed by the command in the Pacific Ocean.
SOUTHCOM did not respond to a request from TomDispatch for a count of how many Venezuelan earthquake victims U.S. troops have saved. But the human cost linked to the command’s lethal boat strikes is already documented: the boat strikes have resulted in at least 215 extrajudicial killings since last September.
The earthquake and the videos are only the latest visible fronts in what the report describes as a broader Trump administration project for Latin America—one involving extreme control. punitive pressure. and militarized enforcement. The piece places Venezuela’s siege, along with a punishing Cuban crackdown and other U.S. efforts across the hemisphere, inside a longer political story that—at its origin—points back to Miami, Florida.
The report’s central thread is that a narrow. wealthy Latin American diaspora concentrated geographically in the greater Miami area captured U.S. hemispheric policy. It did not, the account argues, do so primarily through broad persuasion or public support. Instead. it followed the mathematics of electoral power and its alliance with the Republican Party—forming an informal lobby tied to the idea that the people who benefited from U.S. hostility to left-leaning governments were being protected as a class.
The consequences reach far beyond foreign capitals. Across multiple countries, the account describes a sweeping use of U.S. hard power—ranging from “boots-on-the-ground militarism. knife-to-the-throat death squads. and torture” in Ecuador. to “lawfare. psy-ops. and CIA kill teams” in Mexico. and “mass deportations and support for a gulag state in El Salvador.” It also points to a deadly crackdown on protesters in Bolivia and “outright murder in the Caribbean and Pacific.”.
Within the White House’s Latin America focus, one figure stands out repeatedly in this account: the U.S. State Department’s micromanagement of the recent Colombian elections. The report says Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally approved the deportation of Beto Coral. a Colombian national living in Texas. because Coral has been critical of Trump’s preferred candidate.
Rubio’s role fits a pattern the report presents as disciplined and persistent—even as the White House is described as reckless elsewhere, including in its Iran policy. In Latin America, the account says, Washington maintained a coordinated and targeted effort.
To understand why, the report traces how a Cuban exile political engine in Miami evolved into a wider network tied to the Republican Party and, ultimately, to Trump’s own circle.
It begins with backlash to Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Those who fled Fidel Castro’s socialist government in its early days. the account says. overwhelmingly came from the middle and upper classes and turned the peninsula into a sanctuary. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961—an attempt by the CIA to use exiles as an expeditionary force—the more ideological agency-trained exiles continued to populate what the report calls a counterinsurgent “gothic.” It describes these Cuban émigrés as allied with rogue elements in the CIA and FBI. Colombian drug traffickers. and mafiosi in a pursuit the novelist James Ellroy calls “The Cause.”.
That pursuit. according to the report. pulled trained operatives into the black-bag operations associated with the middle and late Cold War. including the alleged web around JFK’s assassination. It cites a 1979 statement from the House Select Committee on Assassinations: “anti-Castro Cuban groups. as groups. were not involved in the assassination. but the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved in the assassination.” It also describes the execution of revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia and says the operation was led by Félix Rodríguez. a Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA operative who later went to Vietnam to train death squads of the Phoenix Program.
The report connects that history to other covert efforts and to Watergate-adjacent actions and Iran–Contra—an era when Reagan administration officials. it says. secretly sold weapons to embargoed Iran and diverted illegal profits to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua. violating a congressional ban.
Drug profits, the report argues, financed much of the work. It quotes CIA operative-turned-whistleblower John Stockwell: “Every major area of operation in which the CIA has worked has left behind a major functioning drug cartel.” It also cites Foreign Affairs expert Bruce Bagley. who said the beginning of the modern cocaine trade “had developed largely under the control of exile Cuban criminal organizations based in Miami.”.
By the late 1970s. the account says. Miami prospered while much of the country suffered high unemployment. prolonged economic downturn. and urban decay. Laundered cocaine money functioned. it says. like a “covert Keynesian stimulus. ” injecting cash into construction. retail. banking. and services at a moment when the federal government was abandoning such policies as inflationary. It describes Miami’s Fed vault as stuffed with a $5 billion surplus made up of $50 and $100 bills and says real estate boomed. employment boomed. and car dealerships boomed—often paid in cash.
It also describes the growth of Cuban American banking power in Miami. The report says Continental National Bank. the first Cuban American-owned bank in the United States. was founded in 1974 by Carlos Dascal in Little Havana. It says deposits rose from $12 million in annual deposits in the mid-1970s to over $600 million by 1980.
That “wild time. ” the report says. produced a dangerous mix of cocaine and covert operations—embodied. in the account. by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. both CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veterans connected to the New Orleans mob and the drug trade. Together. it says. they founded the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas. or CORU. described by the FBI as “an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization” that served as a subcontractor for Operation Condor. Augusto Pinochet’s hemisphere-wide assassination program.
The report says CORU operatives planted a car bomb in 1976 that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and U.S. colleague Ronni Moffitt in Sheridan Circle in Washington. It also describes a separate CORU attack: the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 off the coast of Barbados that killed all 73 people aboard. including the Cuban national fencing team.
Then comes the recalibration. The report says Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election victory changed the calculus. By Reagan’s arrival in power. it says. exile militants were viewed as a liability—especially if planes were being shot down over the Caribbean or bombs were going off in Washington. The account points to historian Alan McPherson. who it says wrote that by the mid-1970s Cuban exile militants carried out more than 100 bombings on U.S. soil and that in 1974 they accounted for 45 percent of all terrorist bombings in the world.
At that point, the report says, mercenaries were out and lobbyists were in. It describes Reagan’s national security adviser Richard Allen working with Jorge Mas Canosa—who left Cuba in 1960—to create the Cuban American National Foundation. or CANF. The account says Allen explicitly modeled CANF on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. better known as AIPAC. telling Cubans to study the Israeli lobby and replicate its methods. as documented by political scientists Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush.
The report says the goal was to sideline terrorists like Posada and Bosch and marginalize moderate perspectives within the Cuban American community that wanted accommodation with the Cuban government. It adds that Reagan needed a respectable political vehicle for hard-line Cuba policy that could operate openly. That, it says, was CANF.
Mas Canosa, the report says, put his own imprint on the AIPAC model. It describes him combining. in Saul Landau’s words. the style of an “old-style political ward boss” with AIPAC’s lobbying techniques—appointing allies to utility. road. and electoral commissions. awarding contracts. securing jobs and housing for incoming immigrants. and cultivating congressional allies to enforce and strengthen Cuba sanctions.
The report then moves to the foundation’s political breakthrough. In 1989. it says. CANF won its first congressional seat when Cuban-born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen defeated her Democratic opponent to succeed Claude Pepper in the Miami district—Pepper. the account notes. had championed labor. Medicare. and Social Security for more than two decades.
It describes Ros-Lehtinen’s long tenure. saying she served for 30 years as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and became a founding figure of the “Miami neocons. ” a description attributed in the report to South Florida journalist Juan David Rojas. It also says Ros-Lehtinen was an aggressive Cuba hard-liner. a champion of Israel in its Lebanon and Gaza wars. the author of Iran sanctions legislation. and a vocal defender of Orlando Bosch.
The account links Ros-Lehtinen’s influence directly to Trump’s personnel decisions by stating that her former intern was Marco Rubio, now described as Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state.
In Broward County’s Florida’s 25th Congressional District. the report says another Miami neocon role sits with Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It describes her as a Democratic advocate for hard-line policies in Israel and Latin America and says that after her first election in 2004 she worked closely with Trump’s Venezuela figure Mauricio Claver-Carone to squash five initiatives that would have diluted Cuba sanctions.
It adds that at the time Claver-Carone—born in Miami—ran both the U.S.–Cuba Democracy PAC and the Cuba Democracy Advocates. The report says that since 1996 the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. government have channeled more than $100 million into similar “democracy” programs, with many headquartered in Hialeah and Coral Gables. It also says the NGOs’ subcontractors are often protected from disclosure under FOIA exemptions as “trade secrets.”.
Mas Canosa died in 1997, the report says, and conventional wisdom at the time suggested the Cuban American lobby had peaked. It points to poll numbers showing younger Cuban Americans—U.S.-born and English-dominant and less connected to the island—were open to normalization and an end to the embargo. It describes President Barack Obama’s December 2014 announcement restoring diplomatic relations as a major shift negotiated secretly with the help of Pope Francis. and says it seemed to confirm the lobby’s decline.
But the report says the lobby’s influence never went away. It claims the U.S. government continued. in Obama’s final years. to flood Miami with “democracy promotion” grants—federal stimulus that would help activists become some of Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters. It then says Trump ended normalization and imposed harsh sanctions after listening to Florida’s then-Sen. Marco Rubio. After Ron DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial victory, the report says, Florida became the command center of MAGA power.
At that point, the account argues, the exile operation began changing again—this time driven not only by Cuban Americans but by a new wave of Latin American capital flight.
It describes Venezuelans arriving in Florida since Hugo Chávez’s first election in 1998, and later wealthy Brazilians, Bolivians, Argentines, Nicaraguans, and Mexicans joining them. It says Colombians had been coming for decades, fleeing the violence of their country’s civil war.
The report includes a quote attributed to a prominent Miami realtor: “When governments in Latin America go left. buyers go north.” It says the city absorbed Latin American capital flight on a scale larger than the original Cuban exodus. It describes Chile as a case study after Chilean law firms opened offices in Miami for wealthy Chileans around the 2021 election involving Gabriel Boric. It says Boric won and investors pulled money out at a record pace. leaving behind what Bloomberg estimated as a $50 billion hole. It adds that Chileans ranked eighth among foreign buyers of real estate in South Florida in 2021.
Miami’s neighborhoods. the report says. changed accordingly—naming Doral as informally known as “Doralzuela. ” with Brickell filled with Colombian and Brazilian private banking offices. and the Biscayne corridor attracting Mexican. Argentine. and Peruvian capital. It emphasizes that this influx. in the account. was not the poor and desperate arrivals of earlier decades. but propertied business classes seeking ideological allies in Washington to fight social democrats at home.
Then it connects the new arrivals back to political bridges. Following the 2009 military coup in Honduras that ousted elected center-left President Manuel Zelaya. the report says a delegation of Miami Cubans. working with Sen. John McCain, helped bridge AIPAC and the broader Latin American lobby by hosting coup leaders in Washington. It adds that Obama initially opposed the coup government. but after Cuban Americans and other conservatives associated him with Castro and Chávez. he backed down and recognized the regime as legitimate.
The report says the arrivals found a common language in a single word: “castro-chavismo.” It explains the term’s origins in Álvaro Uribe. then describes a rally in October 2016 at Mondongo’s in Doral. with Uribe warning expats that castrochavismo would come to Colombia if a peace deal with the FARC guerrillas was ratified. It says Uribe’s trip deepened ties with Trump’s people and references notes by Adam Isacson and Christy Thornton regarding Uribe’s influence on Trump’s first reelection campaign. including ads linking President Joe Biden to Latin American leftists. It also cites Uribe’s 2020 tweet: “Joe Biden is a PUPPET of CASTRO-CHAVISTAS.”.
Where the narrative turns sharply is in describing how the newer diaspora lobby. in this account. works without a single institutional home like CANF once had. It says the Trump transition team after the 2024 election moved quickly to capture new constituencies and reached out to Félix Maradiaga. a Miami-based Nicaraguan opposition leader stripped of citizenship by strongman president Daniel Ortega. Maradiaga is quoted in the report saying Trump’s envoys urged opponents of Nicaragua. Cuba. and Venezuela to “unite our points of view so that the actions that come from the United States have a joint impact in the quest for democracy.”.
The report describes Mar-a-Lago as a clubhouse for Latin American displaced elites—where. it says. Brazil’s Bolsonaro family bends Trump’s ear. Venezuelan opposition figures convene with White House officials. and Colombian magnates attend fundraisers with Cuban American politicians and businessmen to coordinate “hemisphere’s restoration.”.
It then describes a partially revealed cache of leaked voice notes linked to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. The report says Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking and served a 45-year sentence in a West Virginia federal penitentiary until Trump pardoned him in December 2025. It says the leaked memos reveal Hernández was financed by both Israel and Argentina and that he spent his first night of freedom in the five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel. It also says the memos say his political proxy. current Honduran President Nasry Asfura. was meeting with investors at Mar-a-Lago to discuss sketchy deals with U.S. officials and plan a broader destabilization program targeting Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.
The human impact, in the report’s account, lands inside Florida’s own contradictions. It says the new greater Latin American lobby operates differently from the old CANF model—trading a single-issue ethnic lobby focused on one country for a class-based hemispheric operation united by a common enemy: reformism of even the mildest sort.
It says CANF continues to exist but has fallen into irrelevance, with its PAC dormant and its lobbying function absorbed into a broader, more decentralized Latin America lobby. It adds that Florida’s Republican Party has largely absorbed CANF’s electoral machinery.
The report describes class divisions that existed in the Cuban diaspora but says the single focus on liberating Cuba once muted them. Now, it says, they are more visible.
It points to gated communities in Doral with names like Doral Isles Riviera and Doral Isles Venetia. and wealthy Venezuelans who play golf at Trump National. It contrasts that with “tens of thousands of poorer Venezuelans” who. the report says. risked their lives trekking the Darién Gap to get to the U.S. and then work at the same golf resort while living in constant fear after Trump revoked their Temporary Protected Status.
The report says more than 15,000 deportations followed the revocation—some sent back to Venezuela, others sent to El Salvador’s maximum-security CECOT prison.
It also describes the cruelty as not limited to Venezuelans. It says the Trump administration targeted other poor immigrants, including Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians. It adds that even poor Cubans—who in the past could expect automatic residency—are now being shipped to Mexico. where many. elderly and sick. end up sleeping on streets in cities such as Villahermosa in Tabasco.
A quote appears from Harold A, a 58-year-old Cuban national deported to Mexico earlier this year, who says: “They’re casting us aside to die,” and “They don’t give us anything, nothing. … How are we supposed to eat?”
The report contrasts how wealthy members of the diaspora reportedly view deportations as harsh but necessary to protect their reputation as “exceptional migrants.” It says poorer Venezuelans are referred to by some better-off compatriots as “orcos”—a word the report defines as “orcs. subhumans”—and says Oxford scholar Erick Moreno Superlano has documented this contempt.
The voting power becomes part of the story of who gets represented. The report says these well-to-do exile groups vote as a bloc in their national elections and often decisive for their most Trump-like candidate.
It says that last month in Peru. the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori—who served 16 years in prison for human rights violations including death squad killings—would have lost if only votes cast in Peru were counted. but she ultimately beat her center-left opponent thanks to the votes of the Peruvian diaspora. The report says roughly 9,000 Miami-Dade votes helped her win by less than 1 percent.
It then says Colombians living in Miami turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote for Abelardo De la Espriella. described as a hard-right Trump mimic. helping him win a presidential election as close as Peru’s. The report says De la Espriella is a U.S. citizen and a long-time resident of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Miami. where he worked as a defense lawyer for Colombian clients including paramilitaries. right-wing politicians. and money launderers.
By the end, the report suggests the lobbies’ power may be approaching a familiar turning point: success can create leverage for someone else.
It describes both AIPAC and the broader Latin American lobby as achieving near maximal ambitions in the second Trump term. including a war on Iran and a full-court press on Latin American leftists. It says the tools included U.S. Special Operations forces. CIA assassination teams. naval blockades. and sanctions. and that war powers resolutions to stop Trump’s actions in Iran. Cuba. and Venezuela are routinely blocked by a Republican caucus dependent on AIPAC money and Florida’s electoral votes. often with an assist from a handful of AIPAC Democrats.
It then argues both lobbies now face a kind of backlash. It says Trump’s war in Iran was a tactical and strategic disaster and that the White House lashed out at Israel in ways that. it says. would have been unimaginable a month earlier. It says Vice President JD Vance lectured Israel that it “can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem. ” and that Trump warned Benjamin Netanyahu “you will be on your own very soon.”.
On Latin America, the report says a similar reversal is not certain. It describes Trump still pressing Cuba hard and demanding a “deal. ” but says that deal looks less like regime change and more like an investment prospectus. It frames it as “the Capone Doctrine. ” writing that sanctions destroy foreign competitors. Helms–Burton lawsuits punish anyone who stays. and Trump-connected U.S. investors move in to pick up assets at distressed prices. It also says a business connected to former Trump official Ray Washburne recently muscled out a Canadian mining and cobalt corporation.
The report says Trump’s sanctions worked “too well,” breaking Cuba’s economy so completely that Havana was forced to enact sweeping economic liberalization—reforms, the account says, that serve investors rather than exiles.
In Florida, it says Cuban Americans who have never set foot in Cuba founded organizations including the “National Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba,” hoping Trump would make a country they have never seen theirs again.
But it adds that the hope is dissipating quickly as people face what it describes as their nightmare scenario: Venezuela again—Trump partnering with the existing government and pushing root-and-branch regime change behind oil industry dealmaking.
The report points to ExxonMobil. saying it has a large role in setting Venezuela policy and just won a Supreme Court case allowing it to sue Cuban state-owned companies in U.S. federal courts to win compensation for property confiscated more than 65 years ago. It says the ruling would give the company enormous leverage in what comes next for Cuba.
At the same time, it says Trump deported nearly 8,000 Cuban nationals in his second term—many of them low-income asylum seekers but also a considerable number of middle-class business and property owners.
The closing image, in the report’s telling, is stark: the sugar fields, it says, may not be returned to the children of their former owners any time soon—though they might be put out to bid. In the end, it says, those hoping for restoration will always have Mar-a-Lago.
Across the story, from SOUTHCOM’s posts to ballot blocs and deportations, one fact sits beneath the surface: policy in the region is not only shaped by ideology or alliances—it is shaped by who gets to vote, who gets to lobby, and who gets to stay.
Florida Miami Cuban diaspora SOUTHCOM Venezuela earthquake deportations Marco Rubio AIPAC Mar-a-Lago Cuba sanctions Latin America foreign policy