Florida politics and Trump’s Latin America policies

Sanctions placed on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have met no success, except to help President Trump politically.

However this benighted election eventually turns out, one thing is clear: President Donald Trump’s political instincts stand vindicated, and nowhere more so than in Florida. The administration’s hyper- confrontational policies against the appalling regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have met no success at all in changing the leadership or political landscape in those countries, but they did deliver the United States’ most crucial electoral prize to the president.

Trump’s surprisingly comfortable win in the Sunshine State is a testament to his insight that if you want to win big among those exile communities, macho posturing is a better political strategy than careful diplomacy. Traumatized exiles would love to see the rulers they despise deposed back home, but failing that, many of them are more than ready to settle for revenge.

To be clear, the administration’s maximum pressure policy toward Latin America’s leftist autocracies has done a lot to brutalize everyday people back home and little to discomfit regime hierarchs. Special military- run stores in Venezuela brim with expensive imported goods that the vast majority of Venezuelans could never afford. Caracas is now the kind of city where the well- connected few can hop on an app and get a poke bowl or a bottle of prosecco delivered to their homes in minutes while most people go to bed hungry. Havana has been this way for decades. Neither regime gives any sign of buckling, even as its people grow more and more desperate.

The punitive U. S. sanctions that keep the elites in power while everyone else starves are supposedly designed to push those elites out of power, though a good deal of hand- waving is needed to connect the purported means to the stated end. In reality, it has been visible for quite some time that their real goals are domestic: catering to small but influential exile communities in an electorally crucial state.

The gambit was cynical but effective. It won Trump Florida, necessary if he had any chance to stay in power. To everyday Venezuelans squeezed between a criminal government and a vindictive exile community happy to settle for Trumpian posturing, this state of affairs is a tragedy.

To Trump, it has been an undoubted big success.