It remains a mystery why an administration that styles itself “America First” has prevented third countries from selling food and oil to Havana, exacerbating an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Most Cubans now survive on fewer than two hours a day of electricity, with hospitals struggling to supply patients on life support. The reason, in short, is that Team Trump’s policy toward Cuba now is almost exclusively driven by ideology, rather than rational statecraft. 

The ideology, in turn, is defined by Miami’s enclave of Cuban and other Latin-American exiles. Fundamentally stuck in their native lands, they’re determined to wield American treasure and manpower to redress old grievances. This, instead of attending to the home front, which in South Florida is racked by petty corruption, cultural maladjustment, and the politics of shouting down opponents instead of debating them. 

You could, in fact, call it a form of Third Worldism. 

Yet that term is, ironically, the vague omni-menace conjured by Trump administration hawks to justify their approach to Cuba, among other places. Last month, the State Department unveiled a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism. A seminal piece of MAGA propaganda, the document argues — laughably — that Cuba represents an existential risk to Americans through its sponsorship of “Third Worldism”: an anti-Western animus, replacing traditional Marxism, that supposedly unites resentful foreign hordes the world over.

Speaking with Fox News on the administration’s Cuba policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the report, stating: “To the average American, you see Cuba, a small country — but people forget that they actually are an influence and espionage superpower.” 

Rubio’s words were transparently aimed at integrating MAGA talking points with the, well, Third World grievances of his fellow Miamians. Figures like YouTube influencer Alex Otaola, businessman Marcell Felipe, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.). In fact, it’s these Miami neocons — of mostly Cuban but also Nicaraguan and South American descent — who, in a sense, refuse to assimilate to “Northern” concerns and aspirations, even as they reside here. They also command disproportionate influence on US foreign policy.

 Within the confines of South Florida, it’s hard to miss signs of Third Worldism of a more mundane variety: dead people sign off on building inspections in the Cuban-American suburb of Hialeah; Miami’s notoriously corrupt city council also attempted to cancel 2025’s municipal elections. For decades in South Florida, “Cocaine Cowboys,” such as the infamous drug kingpin Sal Magluta, evaded justice, including one occasion when Magluta walked out of jail after bribing officials. In the past decade, attempted overthrows of not one, or two, but three sitting foreign presidents were plotted by private citizens in Miami, one of which resulted in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.     

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Of course, in Miami, English is a second language. Stumble upon the odd heartland tourist in Miami Beach — like my Appalachian in-laws — and you’ll witness MAGA horror at the sight of hedonistic spring breakers mingling with “too many Latins,” many of whom don’t appear to speak English. Indeed, they don’t. Roughly 75% of residents of Miami-Dade County speak Spanish, with 25% lacking English proficiency. Yet the irony is that many of Miami’s Latin invaders are among the most fervent “anti-communist” supporters of President Trump.

Enter the household of your typical MAGA Miamian for “cafecito,” and you’re likely to view an angry YouTube stream from city native Alexander Otaola. A testament to GOP inclusion, the flamboyantly gay Otaola is an archetypal Miami neocon. Much like Fidel Castro, the bearded pundit diatribes extemporaneously for three hours every weekday, railing against the perceived enemies of US-sponsored “freedom and democracy.” With an audience of around 1 million, his show, ¡Hola Otaola!, is interladen with infomercials for Miami-based plastic surgeons, gold chains, and “anti-communist realtors.”

In 2024, Otaola ran a failed campaign for Miami-Dade county mayor. Naturally, the erstwhile Nixon and Trump consigliere Roger Stone was an advisor; in their shared appearances, the pair’s exchanges were consistently moderated by a Spanish-language interpreter. The fact that the Otaola doesn’t speak English likely cost him with English-language voters. 

Much the same can be said of Otaola’s countless controversies over his censorious — some might say “Third World” — tendencies. The Miami YouTuber rightly derides the Cuban regime over its rampant censorship, surveillance, and state-sponsored humiliations of dissidents. Yet Otaola himself promotes routine boycotts of Cuban artists from his “red list” of those who perform on the island. 

In 2023, he staged a protest caravan to censure a book talk, on the US government’s preferential policies toward Cuban immigrants, by Boston University professor Susan Eckstein. Otaola’s protesters also heckled Eckstein during the event, calling her “comunista”; his student supporters naturally claimed that her presence on campus made them feel “unsafe.” As one Cuban-born attendee later told me, Otaola’s antics reminded him of nothing so much as the Stalinist tactics used by the Havana regime to humiliate opponents, known as “acts of repudiation.”

Reacting to the release of the Cuba Report, Otaola lauded Rubio and the State Department for documenting “step-by-step, minute-by-minute how Havana has been training, funding, and organizing [Left-wing] groups in order to destroy free societies.” To be sure, the body of the report documents the very real affinities — and, in some cases, linkages — between Havana and Leftist radicals like the Weather Underground and the Democratic Socialists of America; last week, DSA co-chair Megan Romer mouthed the revolting words: “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.”

Yet the State report is, in some ways, a break with Miami-neocon orthodoxy. Contrary to the view of older exiles, who hold that Fidel was practically born a Communist, the State Department claims that Marxism “was not the original battle cry of the Cuban Revolution.” Instead, it was the far more insidious “Third Worldism”: a planetary struggle, erupting after World War II, between decolonized countries and “Western civilization itself.” Never mind that Washington supported postwar decolonization in Asia and Africa. 

Where is this stuff coming from? A possible source of inspiration may be the Cuban-American businessman Marcell Felipe. The head of several of Miami’s neoconservative jobs programs — including the media group América TeVé, Inspire America Foundation, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora — Felipe has been at the forefront of Cuban-American outreach within the MAGA Right.

As an attendee of the 2021 National Conservatism conference in Orlando, I was disillusioned to see Miami neocons like Rubio and Felipe alongside ostensible MAGA restrainers such as JD Vance and Michael Anton. During his address — titled, “Why Cubans Get the Marxist Threat” — Felipe presaged Rubio’s future report, arguing that Havana had adapted its communism in order to infiltrate US institutions via “cultural Marxism.” 

By definition, Miami neoconservatism is an evangelical, imperial ideology incompatible with the concept of national sovereignty. At every turn, Miami neocons, Rubio most notably, have found ways of integrating otherwise distinct foreign-policy objectives. Whether it’s fusing regime change in Cuba and Venezuela with the Iran war and the war on drugs, the view from South Florida hawks is that any and all evils trace back to a sinister, interconnected axis stretching from Beijing to Tehran to Moscow to Havana. “Third Worldism” is just the latest spin on this omnicause — one which conveniently centers Cuba and Iran.

Unsurprisingly, the Miami trio of lawmakers Carlos Gimenez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart are the most consistently hawkish on everything from fomenting proxy wars against Russia in Ukraine, Syria, and West Africa to putting boots on the ground in Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba. Within the trio, the most emblematic is Diaz-Balart, whose roots trace back to the highest echelons of the pre-Castro dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

A darling of the gangsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Batista turned Havana’s luxury hotels and casinos over to the US mob in exchange for a personal cut of casino earnings — a reality fictionalized in The Godfather Part II. In turn, his CIA-trained forces killed or disappeared at least 1,500 dissident Cubans during the 1950s. During this time, Diaz-Balart’s father, Rafael, served as Batista’s undersecretary of the interior and as majority leader in the Cuban House of Representatives. In many parts of the West, familial ties to a murderous Third World dictatorship would disqualify any politician in the eyes of voters. But in neoconservative South Florida, such ties portend a life term in Congress.

The irony is that Diaz-Balart’s father was a youth supporter of Batista going back to the dictator’s populist — and Communist-supported — first term in the 1940s. Batista featured members of the Marxist Popular Socialist Party in his cabinet until 1944 and maintained tacit support from the party until 1958. Indeed, the fact that opposition to Batista was both overwhelming and ideologically diverse contributed to the CIA’s pre-1960 determination that Fidel Castro wasn’t a communist; a further irony is that Diaz-Balart’s paternal aunt, Mirta, married Castro.

Naturally, all of this is glossed over by Diaz-Balart and other Miami neocons, who romanticize a pre-Marxist utopia on the island and ignore the legitimate grievances that led to the 1959 revolution in the first place. (In the same way, deluded progressives like DSA co-chair Ashik Saddique gloss over those who aided the revolution but nonetheless were jailed or executed for opposing Castro.)

Instead, the congressman devotes most of his time to regime change abroad; Diaz-Balart’s office features an autocrat collage of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, Cuba’s Raul Castro, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega with the labels: “Arrested,” “Eliminated,” and “Indicted.” 

Accordingly, Diaz-Balart has celebrated the State Department’s screed against Cuban-sponsored “Third Worldism.” Yet much like his late relative-by-marriage Fidel Castro, the congressman has very recently embraced the anti-colonial cause elsewhere — in North Africa. 

Last month, tens of thousands of Moroccan migrants swarmed Ceuta, a city on the North African Coast which Spain has controlled since the 15th century. One could be forgiven for assuming that the Spanish-descended Diaz-Balart would be an avid defender of Spanish Christendom over the invading Muslim hordes. Quite the contrary: the Miami neocon has called for Moroccan annexation of Ceuta and its sister enclave, Melilla, arguing that the pair “are not in the geographic territory of Spain.”

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Wait — what happened to anti-Third Worldist zeal here? Shouldn’t an opponent of Third Worldism defend Christian Spain’s honor? 

Nope. Contrived as they may seem, the congressman’s words ultimately follow a neoconservative logic centered on Cuba. The Spanish government under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been harshly critical of Israel and of America’s conduct in Iran; the Islamic Republic is, of course, a staunch ally of Havana. In contrast, Morocco has taken pains to ally itself with Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — a fact which presumably validates the country’s decolonial grievances against Spain. This, even as Diaz-Balart condemns other forms of decoloniality as Third Worldism.

By far, the most damning aspect of Miami-neocon Third Worldism is the fact that the ideology is responsible for some of America’s worst homegrown terrorists. The State Department’s Cuba report rightly condemns Cuban support for Left-wing groups that carried out hundreds of bombings throughout the United States in the 1970s. “In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972,” the report notes, “the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil” by homegrown radicals. Yet the report conveniently omits that some of these radicals were Right-wing Cuban-Americans, and many of their victims were fellow Cuban exiles who were perceived as insufficiently anti-communist.

In the same decade, authorities linked Cuban-Americans to 113 bombings in the United States, including the 1976 car bombing of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, conducted in concert with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence services. Beyond the US homeland, Miami-based Cuban exiles were responsible for 45% of all bombings on the planet in 1974. In 1976, the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, headed by Miami terrorist Orlando Bosch, bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people on board; CORU was likewise responsible for killing Letelier days prior. Bosch was eventually arrested before being pardoned by George H. W. Bush, thanks to lobbying by Miami Rep. Ilean Ros-Lehtinen, who called Bosch a “patriot and hero” upon his release.

The sad truth is that the uniparty in Washington has long condoned Third Worldism on the part of the Miami neocons; Bosch worked at various points for the CIA. The fact that Miami Third Worldism has risen to new heights under Trump owes largely to the president’s choice of Rubio as secretary of state. As MAGA apostate Pedro Gonzalez has argued, moreover, Trumpism can sometimes display the aspects of a Third World movement; last December, Miami-Dade’s Hialeah suburb announced the construction of a bronze, 12-foot statue of “Donald Trump the Fighter.” Whether in rhetoric or substance, Trump resembles many hostile and friendly Latin American caudillos.

Come what may, it seems clear that competing strands of tinpot Third Worldism will continue to hold sway over the most jingoistic and deluded in MAGA and the DSA respectively. In the unlikely event of a course correction in MAGA or Miami, the city’s neoconservative Latinos would do well to emulate their Mexican-American peers. Aside from a handful of US-based elite Mexicans, most Mexican-Americans — many of whom have lived in the United States for centuries — neither know nor care what goes on politically south of the border; adults of Mexican heritage likewise have one of the highest rates of English proficiency: at 69%, compared 59% of Cubans and 51% of Venezuelans.

Until Miami neocons assimilate into the American polity by renouncing their faith in regime-change wars — and learning English — they will inevitably entangle the rest of us in the petty grievances of America’s Magic City.

And so Pedro told Tony his life story: his rustic childhood in Villa Clara, his polio diagnosis, his days in Havana, his stint as a lector in a cigar factory, reading adventure novels to the cigar rollers. Pedro also told Tony about the greatness of the United States. One day, sitting on the porch, Tony made a promise to his grandfather: when he grew up, he would “lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba”.

Even after Little Tony had become US Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio, he never forgot that promise. In his memoir An American Son (2012), in which he reminisces about that Miami porch, he describes Pedro as his “tutor”. And it seems he is still trying to make him proud. Since January, the Trump administration has been closing in on Cuba. It has tightened its embargo and sent the US navy to circle the island like a shiver of sharks. The US Justice Department has also indicted former leader Raúl Castro for murder. As always, the Cuban people are bearing the brunt of the US campaign of maximum pressure. Blackouts take place daily, and food and medicine are hard to come by. And as always, the pinchos grandes are comfortable in their fortified mansions, with their back-up generators and well-stocked fridges.

Against this dramatic backdrop, rumors abound that the US will invade. “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years,” Trump mused back in May, “and it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.” Rubio’s message has been much the same of late. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba,” he said, “as long as these people are in charge.”

Whether this is fighting talk or just bluff is anyone’s guess. Given the Iranian quagmire, Trump and Rubio might choose instead to play the long game with Cuba. “What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves,” Rubio told Axios last week. “One of the things we’ve lost in American foreign policy is the concept of patience and persistence. My level of confidence is that when this administration is over, at a minimum, Cuba will be on an irreversible glide path toward a different future.” The future Rubio envisions is pretty clear: he wants to bring down the communist leadership and privatize the economy. And he is prepared to wait. It’s difficult, however, to imagine Cuba resisting for that much longer. 

For Trump, getting the better of Cuba is a crucial part of his Donroe Doctrine. After getting rid of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, he wants to further US dominance in the Southern Hemisphere. Despite its tiny size, Cuba carries huge symbolic significance. It was the outpost of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and today is a Chinese ally. American presidents since John F. Kennedy have tried to oust the communist regime. Not one has even come close. To pull it off would be legacy-defining. After Trump’s humiliating climbdown in Iran, he needs a win to restore his tough-guy image — and Cuba makes for easy prey.

For Rubio, however, this is personal. He has been harboring a grudge against Cuba’s leaders since childhood, biding his time. Dale tiempo al tiempo, as the Latin American proverb goes. Give time to time. Now, at last, he may be nearing his grand finale. In a video message in Spanish to the Cuban people, Rubio promised “a new path between the US and a new Cuba”. He added, “The only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.” 

Their country is also Rubio’s, although he has never set foot there. He was born in Miami in 1971, 12 years after the revolution which saw Fidel Castro sweep into power in Havana. Castro promised to free the island from the rule of Fulgencio Batista, a military strongman backed by the US. But it soon became obvious that Castro had no interest in democracy. In 1961, he came out as a Marxist-Leninist and aligned with the Soviet Union. Between 1959 and 1973, more than 600,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States. Castro called them gusanos (worms). They called themselves exiles. The vast majority settled in Miami, congregating south of downtown in a cheap neighborhood now known as Little Havana. Soon there were Cuban eateries and Cuban barber shops and Cuban jewelry stores. Castro’s kid sister, who hated him, even opened a pharmacy there.

Rubio grew up not far from Little Havana. Although he lived between the ages of eight and 13 in Las Vegas, where his father worked as a hotel bartender, he is a true product of Cuban Miami. He liked to tell people that his parents fled Cuba in 1959, the year of the revolution. This origin story fueled his rise in the Republican Party of Florida and later in national politics. In 2009, during his run for the Senate, he tweeted: “Thank you USA for welcoming my parents 50 years ago.” Two years later, Rubio told an interviewer that “the direction we’re going in Washington, DC, would make us more like the rest of the world, and not like the exceptional nation that my parents found when they came here from Cuba in 1959.”

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Except that’s not quite how it happened. In 2011, two American reporters, Manuel Roig-Franzia and Alex Leary, broke a big scoop: Rubio’s parents had actually settled in Miami in 1956, three years before the revolution. At the time, Castro was in Mexico plotting the revolution. This means the Rubios left Cuba in search of the American dream, rather than to escape communism. In Miami’s exile community, pre-Castro economic migrants are derided as verduleros (vegetable street vendors).

One can guess why Rubio preferred to say his parents arrived in 1959: it surely made for a better, neater story. Critics who insisted he lied purely for “political gain” were missing the point. His attempt at self-mythology tells us a lot about how he sees himself and his political mission. It seems Rubio has internalized his community’s history. Three years naturally makes a big difference to journalists, but I imagine they make little psychological difference to a Cuban kid growing up in Miami.

“Look, that’s not the way it was discussed in our family or by many people in the exile community,” Rubio explained after the story broke in 2011. “It’s more about the loss of their home country.” In the minds of Cuban exiles, their native island is akin to the promised land. “Next year in Havana!” is a popular slogan in Miami, a riff on the Jewish phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem!”, pronounced during Passover.

Besides, Rubio’s grandfather, Pedro, did leave Cuba after Castro’s takeover. He had actually first moved to the US in 1956 to be closer to his daughters, according to Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of Rubio. But after the revolution he moved back to the island. He struggled to make a living in the US and didn’t want to be a burden to his family. At the time, there was still hope that something positive would come out of the revolution. Pedro even found a decent job as a clerk in a government ministry. But he couldn’t stand the oppressive atmosphere. Soon, he was back in Miami.

Immediately after the revolution, Cuban exiles began plotting ways to reverse it. Young Rubio wasn’t the first to dream of toppling Castro. As early as 1960, the US government had set out its Cuba policy in a secret memo: “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US.” How would it do that exactly? “Covert action.” And who would carry that out? Cuban exiles, for the most part.

The opening shot in the contrarrevolución came in 1961, when the US landed 1,500 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba. Castro’s forces were ready for them and struck back hard. The only chance of success would have been for the US to provide air support. President Kennedy refused, and the invasion was defeated. But the exiles, and the CIA, never stopped plotting to take down Castro. Through the decades, Miami buzzed with intrigue. 

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Rubio came of age in this feverish urban swamp. At home or in his car, he would tune in to Radio Mambi or WQBA, which broadcast round the clock about the evils of Castro and the heroism of the exiles. This time, the master plan would work out, this was the one. Next year in Havana! Business deals and secret plots were hatched at corner tables at restaurants like Versailles or the Tropical. And violence was never far away, as journalist Ann Louise Bardach reveals in her 2004 book Cuba Confidential. Hardline exiles targeted anyone deemed too soft. Dialogueros, who supported negotiations with the Cuban government, were traitors. And there was only one way to deal with traitors: with a bullet to la cabeza. Between 1973 and 1976, anti-Castro groups carried out more than 100 attacks in South Florida. The exile banker Bernardo Benes told Bardach that “Miami is like Guatemala”. Benes lived in constant fear for his life after brokering a deal in 1978 that freed 3,600 political prisoners from Castro’s jails. “No one is interested in free speech in Dade County. Only in Havana.”

The exile community was hierarchical. The Rubios, who had working-class jobs and went out for pancakes every Sunday morning, were nowhere near the top. El jefe was the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the billionaire founder of the Cuban American National Foundation. His statue now overlooks Miami Beach. He was a power broker who spoke like a heavy in a Forties film noir. Once, when lobbying a congressman, he reportedly said: “If you cooperate with me you get the honey. Otherwise, I hit you with the jar.” Another heavyweight exile was Rafael Díaz-Balart, former brother-in-law of Fidel. At the turn of the century, two of his sons went into politics and were elected to the US Congress. In Little Havana, they were hailed as the chosen ones, destined to free their homeland. 

Yet it was a young campaign volunteer who would reach the top. By now, people called him Marco. After graduating from law school in Miami, Rubio set his sights on a political career. At 34, he became the speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Five years later, a US senator. And at 53, Secretary of State. Among ambitious Cuban-Americans, he was never the most likely to find himself in this position. Others were richer, better connected. And yet here he is. A talented, hungry politician with a killer instinct. 

Now comes his biggest political test yet. Rubio has long been seen as the archetypal Republican hawk. His idol is Ronald Reagan. Growing up, he writes in his memoir, his grandfather Pedro would tell him: “America must be a strong country.” That belief in American exceptionalism motivates Rubio as much as his hostility towards the Cuban regime. To be sure, US leaders shouldn’t conduct foreign policy based on desires of revenge. And if they are the children of immigrants, they shouldn’t import their parents’ feuds. But this isn’t the case here: Rubio’s feud with Cuba is also America’s feud. The island nation remains a hub in the anti-American axis. 

When Rubio was 13 and still went as Tony, his grandfather Pedro was admitted into hospital. He didn’t have long. Tony was at his bedside throughout, and as Pedro died he took his hand. “I swore I would do something with my life and make him proud,” Rubio wrote in his memoir. Decades later, he is in the unique position to vanquish one of America’s oldest foes, and avenge his family. Will he succeed?

It was not the first time I had been in South Beach. An earlier visit to Florida had come about by happenstance. A chilly autumn in the mid-Nineties, and I was on a book tour through half a dozen northern cities — New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, San Francisco — when a last-minute invitation came for me to do a public reading at the Miami Book Fair. I imagine someone important had canceled, and the cry went up, “Send Banville, he’ll go anywhere.”

I arrived in Miami late in the evening, befuddled by a combination of my chronic and incurable fear of flying, and the jorums of business-class bubbly — yes, it was tough, in those days — with which I had sought to quell my vertiginous terrors. The hotel, right on the front in South Beach, at first struck me as quaint, and then as downright shabby. It was a hot night, even for Miami, and there was no air conditioning in my room, except for an enormous wooden fan in the ceiling creakily circling directly above my bed; of course to me, spreadeagled sleepless beneath it, it looked like nothing so much as an airplane propeller.

When I questioned the person at reception about the down at heel appearance of the place, and the fact that few things in my room worked, I was loftily informed that the hotel had recently hired a hot-shot designer to “distress” the building back to how it had looked, and functioned, when it was built in the Thirties. The Grand Hotel Gimcrack, the manager himself assured me, was now one of the most fashionable destinations in this most fashionable of Floridian resorts.

Further assorted shocks were in store.

I had been woken that morning by the din of many persons vigorously at play outside; in fact, the racket had been going on all night but my exhaustion had deafened me to most of it. I rose shakily from my bed of pain, balancing on my forehead an invisible cutglass flute in which my hangover was busily fizzing, and stumbled to the window and drew open the slatted shutters, wincing against the thrumming sunlight and the harsh sea-glare.

Spread before me on street, on grass, on sand and in the blue-and-white breakers was a scene of carousal, in which everyone seemed to be about seven feet tall, as near to naked as they could be without inviting arrest, and perfectly, oh but perfectly, suntanned. All were moving, and all were making noise. This I had more or less expected — my sons when young never missed an episode of Miami Vice — but there was one spectacle that baffled me utterly.

Just across the street, beyond a low hedge, was a paved pathway upon which many marvelously youthful and, again, half-naked titans and titanesses were effortlessly, endlessly gliding back and forth, swooping and bending and elegantly pirouetting, without it seemed the slightest danger of collision or collapse. Because of the hedge I could see them only as far down as their taut calves and glistening shins. My God, I thought, they’ve had their feet removed and been fitted with wheels instead!

I had come from Ireland, where at the time the rollerblade was as yet unheard of.

II

The reading in which I was to participate took place in a large, airy and somehow reverberant pavilion, into which people would stroll and stop for a moment and then stroll out again, with what seemed to be either moody disdain or frustrated eagerness; the real action, at these events, is always elsewhere, on the next stage, in the next hall, or in that bar where the celebrities congregate though no one knows where it is.

The writer I was to read with had the previous day been named as that year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This was a small detail the PR people at my publishers had neglected to share with me. After the event, we two performers were led to a large, sunny courtyard and seated at a pair of small tables on which were piled many copies of our books, to be sold and signed.

Awaiting the Pulitzer winner was a queue of fluttering fans that stretched, as far as I could see, halfway up the spine of Florida. In my line there were three people. One was a scholar from the University of Miami who was writing something on my work, the second was the madman in the raincoat — there is always a madman in a raincoat, bearing urgent testimony along with a thick, much-thumbed and long pored-over manuscript — and the third a smiling, kindly fellow who leaned down at my ear and whispered that he was not going to buy my book, but he had thought to stop and say a few words to me, since I looked so lonely.

Afterwards, my scholar friend bought me a consolatory drink and walked me to my hotel. I was sure the back of my neck was still burning from embarrassment. We came out on to Ocean Drive, and passed by a fine old house, three-story, cream-painted, with balconies, and a mock-medieval front door studded with iron bolts, and luxuriant palms in giant pots flanking a decorative, wrought-iron gate.

“That’s Versace’s place,” my friend said. “Casa Casuarina.”

“Versace?” I said. “Versace who?”

My friend sighed.

“Gianni Versace,” he said. “Fashion designer. Which century are you living in?”

III

His name, and the name of the house, must have lodged in some dusty cubbyhole of my mind, for I was able immediately to retrieve them when, some years later, in 2001 or so, an American style magazine contacted me to ask if I would be interested in writing a piece on Casa Casuarina, in South Beach, Florida.

Why?

It has been bought by a local businessman, I was told. He’s going to transform it into a private club, or maybe a small hotel, and he wants to have an impression done of the place as it is, before the redesigners arrive.

“Why did Versace sell it?” I innocently asked.

A pause, and then:

“He was murdered, years ago. What planet are you living on?”

IV

Gianni Versace was one of the most successful, iconoclastic and outrageously talented fashion designers of the 20th century. He was born in 1946 in the south of Italy, in Reggio Calabria, a place he loved and was proud of. His mother was a dressmaker — aha! — and his sister was, and is, the redoubtable Donatella, his business partner. He was interested in ancient history, his birthplace being soaked in the stuff, but also he looked hard at the modern painters, Andy Warhol and his ilk, if Andy Warhol has an ilk.

Success came quickly, and before he knew it Gianni was hobnobbing with such figures as Elton John, Lady Diana, Naomi Campbell, Joan Collins. He designed and sold lots of womenswear, founded the Versace brand, which makes everything from, oh, I don’t know, frocks to fragrances, and worked on opera and film sets. He was flamboyantly gay, declared that he did not believe in good taste, and generally thumbed his nose at the wiseacres of the industry in which he was making trunkloads of money. Giorgio Armani is said to have said that while Armani dresses the wife, Versace dresses the mistress.

By the early 2000s all this was probably known to the entire world, but not to me. When I was asked to travel to Miami and write about his house, my first reaction was to laugh — I knew as much about houses as I do about fashion design — but after a moment or two I stopped laughing and said, yes, why not? An adventure is an adventure. And Casa Casuarina would turn out to be both a revelation and a delight. My time there was a sort of dreamwalk into another, gorgeous world which to my surprise touched on my own old rumpled world in unexpected ways.

V

This time I took the right gear with me. On my first, humiliating visit to South Beach I had only winter woolens to wear, and when I ventured outdoors in my tweed jacket and worsted trousers and slithered and slipped my way among those jostling, oilily bronzed Brobdingnagians, I felt like a cloth-moth in search of a shady crevice in which to lodge until the weather cooled. Now I was decked out in short-sleeved shirts and lightweight slacks and loafers. Not shorts, however; I draw the line at shorts; later, my wife and I often bemoaned the tragic legacy of the Covid lockdown: men in shorts.

The new owner of Casa Casuarina, Peter Loftin, who had made a lot of money in the telecom business, was a large, laconic fellow with the softly burnished skin and fair coloring that seems exclusive to successful American businessmen. He received me with old-fashioned Southern courtesy, and suggested that before he showed me the house we should stroll over to a nearby restaurant for lunch and a talk.

It was a good restaurant, and a good talk.

I expected directives as to how I should approach the “legacy” of Casa Casuarina, and so on, but not a bit of it. Peter was a gentleman, and assured me straight off that he had no intention of telling me what to write or how to write it. He had heard I was good at describing houses — from whom, I wonder? — and that was all he expected me to do: write about an old house. I felt like a character in a Henry James novel being charmed by a cultivated plutocrat of the American Gilded Age.

We sat on the restaurant terrace in the shade of a giant palm trees, one of the many such that stand about the city, murmuring to themselves and gently clattering their fronds. I spoke of Ireland, he spoke of America. Both countries were in a relatively calm state at the time — we had an IRA ceasefire in Northern Ireland, and the United States had that good ole boy Bill Clinton as president — and the conversation was discursive and easy. Life is like that, on occasion.

When we returned to Casa Casuarina there was clustered around the front steps a crowd of 20 or 30 rubber-neckers, bedecked with cameras and doing the things rubber-neckers do. I asked why they were there, and I caught Peter not giving me a pitying look.

“Didn’t you know?” he said. “That’s where he was shot, right there on those steps. There’s always a crowd.”

VI

The house was built in 1930, in a U-shape surrounding an elegant courtyard. The building itself has a slight suggestion of the Cote d’Azur in its Scott Fitzgerald days of ease and excess. At the front door Peter handed me over to his staff, professionals to a man, woman and maid. I was shown to my room, an airy birdcage with, yes, a wooden fan circling in the ceiling, but this one was for decorative purposes only. This was, so the major domo informed me, the only room in the house to boast a bath.

Madonna always stayed here, in the old days, the major d’ murmured, with a nostalgic little smile. She was fond of a bath.

I began to unpack, but I had that buzz in the blood I always get when I arrive in a foreign place; a stroll about the neighborhood would get rid of the jitters. The folk on the street were as they had been on my previous visit, loose-limbed, honey-hued and noisy. I followed Peter’s directions to the café where each morning Versace bought a newspaper and drank an espresso. I bought a newspaper, and drank an espresso.

Back at the house, I was told that I had been moved to another room, as the one I had been first assigned was not cool enough.

“Madonna’s favorite room is not cool enough?” I asked, with a stare.

Polite laughter. What was meant was that the air conditioning was not working properly.

“Oh, right,” I said grumpily; for I was disappointed, as who would not be?

In recompense, they put me in Gianni’s own room, where I would sleep in his bed, among his treasures — all of them at once garish and exquisite — and think how strange life is, and how strange the situations it lands us in sometimes.

VII

I had foreseen vulgarity at Casa Casuarina, and I got it, in spades. However, it was not the kind or quality of the vulgar that my cultural short-sightedness had led me to expect. The Casa Casuarina was a masterpiece of interior design, and every inch of the place was stamped with the personal mark of one man. Versace’s genius, I saw right away, was to have aestheticized bad taste. Everything, from the ubiquitous and tiny stained-glass windows to the garden pool with its million pieces of blue mosaic — specially imported from Italy — should not have worked, but did, triumphantly. The place was beautiful despite.

The key to Versace’s success was nothing more, and nothing less, than absolute, rigid but always loving attention to detail.

For instance. I was walking across the courtyard one day when I thought to take notice at last of the rain ducts, half a dozen of which were set flush into the tiles at measured intervals. They were circular, four or five inches in diameter, and made of bronze. To examine one of them in detail I had to kneel down and lean forward at a sharp angle.

In the center of the little drain was set a figure I recognized at once as the Medusa head which was Versace’s trademark. It was a treasure in itself, the features perfectly molded, with heavy tresses and tragically lowered eyes and exquisitely sulky mouth. Had Versace expected people to get down on their knees, as I had — not a posture the beautiful people would favor — in order to see close-up this meticulously and marvelously made little objet? But that was the point: they were exquisite, they were there, and what matter if no one saw them up close?

I cannot remember how long I stayed at Casa Casuarina — a short week, I suppose — but in that time I came to know the place and, yes, to fall in love with it. Even the kitchen was a masterpiece of design, while the bathrooms, even the ones sans a Madonna tub, were chambers of grave quietude, such that a noble Roman would retire into when one of the more demented Caesars had ordered him to fall on his sword.

As a schoolboy Gianni Versace attended a liceo classico in Calabria, and studied Latin and Greek. He may not have completed the course — I see him as impatient, always impatient — but the lessons he learned there abided. As I got to know Casa Casuarina, as I came to be able to feel I was not staying but living there, I was reminded irresistibly of two of the most impressive, for me, of Italy’s ancient sites.

Everyone goes to Pompeii, a charnel house which should be bulldozed over, in the same way that the Colosseum in Rome, that vile abattoir, should be razed to the ground. But a little way to the north, in the city of Herculaneum, something precious endures; here are rooms decorated with murals, the paint as fresh as if it had been applied yesterday, that surely Versace knew, and emulated, whether consciously or by aesthetic osmosis.

And then there are the mosaics at Ravenna, that western outpost of Byzantium which was once the capital city of the Christian world. In the Basilica of San Vitale there is a mosaic portrait of the Empress Theodora, a very grand lady who is said, by Procopius in his Secret History, to have started out as a sexual athlete performing in the city’s Hippodrome, and went on to marry the God-tormented Emperor Justinian. Look at her. That’s a Versace gown she’s wearing, if ever I saw one.

On one of the nights when I was at the Casa, Peter held a grand party — there seemed to be lots of local grandees present, anyway — and at one point in the evening I found myself standing in the soft warm darkness on a high balcony and looking down upon the courtyard where the stately shenanigans were in progress. In a corner of the garden there stood — I wonder if it is still standing? — a pretty little pergola containing six open showers, handy for sea-bathers to wash off the salt, and, later in the evening, for post-orgy sluice-downs.

As I lingered there, I reminded myself that the Greeks and the ancient Romans painted their statues in the most garish of colors and decorated them with all manner of frivolous furbelows. The notion we have of the classical world, foisted on us by Winckelmann and other fossilized antiquarians, is a marmoreal fantasy. Athens and Rome were not marbled cities; rather, they had the aspect, and surely the atmosphere, of a Liberace concert. That was Versace’s genius, to remember and acknowledge that the Glory that was Rome was in fact vulgarity writ large. And the ancients gloried in it.

Consider a photograph, any photograph, of Gianni Versace when he was at the height of his wealth and fame. Look at that big square handsome head, the trim beard, those dark, ever-smiling eyes in the depths of which lurks a glint of terror, the terror of a man of vast talent who knows that he must depend for his fame and wealth on the denizens of café society, people at once cheap and fabulously famous, who might turn on you in a flash or, more devastatingly, turn away from you, towards the newest bright young acrobat prancing upon the sandy floor of the Hippodrome. Both Athens and Rome would have recognized him, and his genius.

He was only 50 when his nemesis, a “spree killer”, so it is said, stepped up behind him as he was entering the front gate of the Casa Casuarina and shot him through the skull at point-blank range. There was no motive for the killing, it seems — just part of the spree. One imagines an observer on some planet in the region of Cygnus X-1, say, whose tedious task it is to monitor our blandly pastel world, seeing, that day in the middle of July in 1997, at the edge of a finger of land pointing south from one of the northern continents, a shimmering spot of vividest color being suddenly extinguished.

Early on, there was some hope that the White House would forgo the first term’s amateur coup attempts and moralistic posturing against Maduro. Among his first acts in 2025, President Trump dispatched special envoy Richard “Ric” Grenell to broker an America First understanding with the Caracas regime.

Under the deal, Chevron could continue to export Venezuelan crude Stateside through the renewal of a Biden-era oil license. In exchange, Caracas agreed to accept deportation flights of its citizens — a vital priority given the subsequent suspension of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the US homeland. The administration thus made good on two campaign pledges: boosting fossil fuels and deporting illegal migrants. 

Sadly, this understanding underwent a series of erratic twists in the ensuing months, a turn of events caused mostly by Miami’s community of Right-wing Latin-American exiles.

Fly to Miami from the American heartland, and you’ll find what can appear like a Right-wing foreign country, where Spanish prevails over English; and where denizens of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and, especially, Cuban extraction pray at the altar of neoconservative ideology. This, even as they have recreated the clientelist politics of their homelands within the city council. 

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Drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as state- and nonstate-sponsored regime-change operations across the hemisphere form part of the city’s past and present mythology. Influencers like Alexander Otaola grandstand in the form of three-hour, Castro-esque rants on YouTube, offering any and all justification for toppling regimes from Havana to Tehran.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s initial pragmatism on Venezuela didn’t play well in Miami. Similarly, many were also blindsided by the administration’s DOGE-era austerity drive. In tandem with the virtual dismantling of USAID, the White House slashed more than $100 million in grants for the National Endowment of Democracy and related South Florida NGOs set up to combat the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan regimes. In March, two of the city’s hawk honchos — Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, the spokesperson for the NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart — assured the Spanish-language network Telemundo that the administration would restore funding for the city’s neoconservative jobs programs.

Sure enough, Miami elites deployed their man on the inside, Marco Rubio, as well as the Miami-Dade trio of lawmakers Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez, and Maria Elvira Salazar. The secretary of state (and later acting national-security adviser) quickly got to work restoring the various regime-change programs and helping appoint a list of allies to key government offices, including Miami native Mauricio Claver-Carone as special envoy to Latin America, former Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Cabrera as ambassador to Panama, Florida neoconservative Mike Waltz as national-security adviser and later UN ambassador, and longtime hemispheric hawk Christopher Landau as deputy secretary of state.  

The trio of representatives threatened to sink Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in Congress unless the administration rescinded Chevron’s oil license. The White House caved, with severe consequences for the welfare of the oppressed Venezuelans that Miami neocons claim to represent. 

Unable to deport them to their home country after the deal was nixed, the administration labeled 238 Venezuelan nationals as “narcoterrorist” combatants, deporting them to El Salvador’s gruesome Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Yet 87 percent of the deportees lacked criminal records, which reportedly infuriated Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, who had explicitly insisted that only hardened criminals be sent for imprisonment in the CECOT. 

All the more ironic was the revelation that many of the same deportees qualified as Venezuelan dissidents, having suffered persecution from the regime after participating in anti-Maduro demonstrations during the 2010s. Beyond the Salvadoran debacle, the administration’s draconian treatment of legal and illegal immigrants — and in some cases, US citizens — has stirred animosities in South Florida.

Historically, Florida Republicans have been more than willing to “import voters” via an open border with Cuba through the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Activists like Gutierrez-Boronat have argued that any and all Cubans are eligible for asylum on account of the island’s repressive conditions as a Communist country. Similarly, Rubio was an ardent defender of the Biden administration’s Temporary Protected Status program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans up until he joined the Trump administration.

Like Rubio, local influencers and elected officials have since attempted to spin mass deportation to a conflicted South Florida constituency; in my hometown of Coral Springs, Fla., agents in military gear surrounded a home with rifles to arrest an unarmed handyman with no criminal record. Accordingly, Rep. Salazar cosponsored the bipartisan Dignity Act, pairing national and mandatory E-Verify with a path for certain illegals to obtain legal status. For this crime, MAGA luminaries like Ryan Girdusky called for Salazar to be primaried.

But amid the back and forth, Rubio again got busy cultivating his influence operation. Miami’s dutiful son is today simultaneously serving as secretary of state, national-security adviser, and US archivist. Seeking to placate Bukele and to outflank Grenell, Rubio brokered a three-way prisoner swap repatriating CECOT’s Venezuelan nationals in exchange for the release of 10 US citizens under Venezuelan custody. Chevron’s oil license was once more renewed, which subsequently led to the resumption of deportation flights to Venezuela in July.

But apparently, to Rubio’s mind, this was a temporary reprieve. The secretary soon focused his efforts on persuading MAGA’s militarist and Jacksonian factions, which have long yearned for cartel wars in Mexico, to redirect their fire and fury toward Venezuela. In addition to Rubio and his allies, it’s worth noting that Trump is surrounded by Florida natives well versed in the narrative of Venezuelan “narcoterrorism,” including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.

The secretary has likely persuaded the president as well as Stephen Miller that removing Maduro would not only halt drug flows, but also enable further deportations by installing the subservient Venezuelan opposition. And while Maduro has allegedly offered to hand over all of Venezuela’s resource wealth to Washington, the hawks no doubt argue that the opposition, once in power, would hand over the country’s oil anyway; in October, Trump ordered Grenell to halt further outreach to Caracas. 

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Finally, the White House’s about-face on Venezuela also serves a clear electoral logic. In 2024, Trump won a historic 45% of Latinos, including 70% and 50% of Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, respectively. A year later, the president’s approval rating with the same group has fallen to just 27%, including an 18-point drop among Latino Republicans. Electorally, regime change in Venezuela provides a strong incentive for Latino neocons to overlook abuses like deporting a Cuban national without charge or process to a maximum security prison in Eswatini. When I asked my Venezuelan neighbor on the subject, he said he resented Venezuelans being treated like animals but would look the other way if Washington deposed Maduro.

Yet there are significant flaws in the plan. Venezuela has been on the cusp of failed-state status for more than a decade and is the third most corrupt country on the planet. Regime change via foreign military intervention could trigger complete state collapse, inviting warlords and armed groups to carve up the country into criminal fiefdoms. Leftist guerrillas like the ELN and FARC are deeply entrenched within Venezuelan society and have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution.” A violent insurgency of the kind waged by both groups during the Nineties in neighboring Colombia against a US-installed government would likely lead to calls for further interventions from Washington; quagmires in Latin America are no more pleasant than those in Mesopotamia.

Such a scenario could trigger more emigration to neighboring countries and eventually the United States, not to mention jeopardize oil production and ironically strengthen the drug trade. Trump has claimed that for every boat bombed in the Caribbean, 25,000 lives were saved in the homeland. Yet Venezuela acts mainly as a transit country for no more than 13% of Colombian cocaine and zero percent of the far deadlier fentanyl.

Under Trump, fentanyl flows through the southern border have declined by more than 40% thanks to the president’s border policies and historic cooperation with the government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. So far this year, Sheinbaum has extradited nearly 60 drug lords north of the border, including Chinese fentanyl kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang on Friday; fentanyl precursor chemicals are known to originate in China before being shipped to Mexico. Why divert energy and focus from these efforts to a regime-change war in a country that, though misruled, has little to do with fentanyl?  

As for regime change, in 2019, Marco Rubio posted a bloodied image of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in response to protests against Maduro. But Gaddafi’s overthrow was in retrospect a disaster, creating state failure and disorder that continues to radiate in North Africa and Southern Europe. Overthrowing Maduro willy-nilly could create similar conditions — only much closer home. Rather than enable a post-Gaddafi Libya in our hemisphere, the Trump administration would do well to sideline Rubio and his allies and cut another deal with Maduro.    

The absence was especially surprising to Furio Tedeschi, the artist who designed the bull. He had submitted his design to Tradestation with “huge, mechanical balls” — only for the firm to neuter it. “Prosperity and wealth shouldn’t have any gender,” a company official explained. It might seem odd that a symbol of the overwhelmingly masculine crypto community — it is estimated that 94% of crypto accounts are owned by men — has been castrated in the name of diversity. But for a product built on faith, appearances matter.

That the price of various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, began a spectacular decline only weeks after the bull was neutered is the kind of irony that crypto-types would otherwise revel in. But as the realities of the “crypto winter” set in, there wasn’t much joy to be had in a community known for its in-joke culture. The collapse of a number of prominent crypto firms, such as FTX, last November saw crypto crashing to lows that hadn’t been seen for years. The price of Bitcoin dropped to $16,000, only a year after it reached a record high of $69,000, seeming to herald the end of a Bitcoin boom.

These rapid fluctuations in crypto prices were keenly felt in the neutered bull’s new home. While Miami might not yet attract as many crypto transactions in dollar volume as San Francisco and New York City — though it is fast gaining on them — it is one of crypto’s undisputed cultural centres, and has the fastest-growing number of tech jobs in the country. Describing the city as one that moves from “from hustle to hustle”, Miami mayor Francis Suarez has repeatedly praised crypto, once saying that it offers a “tsunami of opportunity”. Natural disasters aren’t usually a metaphor leaders reach for when promoting their cities. But in Miami’s high-risk, high-reward culture, where boom and bust cycles are part of doing business, his phrase feels appropriate.

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Suarez has opted to surf the tsunami, using traditional methods to promote crypto business, including a favourable ecosystem of tax breaks and friendly legislation, combined with an attractive lifestyle for workers. These perks have created considerable momentum for firms to move there: investment in Miami-based crypto start-ups jumped from $6 million in 2020 to $745 million just one year later. There has also been a steady stream of Bitcoin parties and conventions, encouraging potential investors to associate crypto with a lavish lifestyle. Indeed, some have had a little too much fun with crypto: last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission froze $100 million in assets of Miami-based crypto company BKCoin and one of its co-founders, Kevin Kang. Describing it as a Ponzi scheme, in which investor funds were mixed with Kang’s, the SEC alleges that $371,000 alone was spent on sporting tickets, holidays and an apartment in New York City.

There are plenty of reputable crypto enthusiasts who argue that the currency is a hedge against inflation, and a bulwark against corrupt governments. The blockchain ledgers on which it is stored are said to be incorruptible, and the complex mathematical equations required to unlock the coins constrain supply. But these digital assets also undoubtedly attract those looking to launder fiat currency from dubious sources. One report last year found that $8.6 billion was laundered through cryptocurrency in 2021, up by 30% from the previous year. It’s the currency of choice from Mexican drug cartels, who pump about $25 million through it annually, to Russian mafia figures, one of whom was extradited from Greece to the United States last year, charged with a $4 billion laundering scheme.

Miami has, inevitably, seen a number of high profile crypto-related arrests. In January, Anatoly Legkodymov — a Russian national who legally resides in China, operated the crypto exchange Bitzlato out of Hong Kong, and did his work in Miami — was arrested by Florida authorities for running a $700 million “haven” for funds “intended for use in criminal activity”. Months earlier, a respected 76-year-old University of Miami professor of global crime networks was jailed for money laundering. He had been working with Alex Saab, a Colombian national and “super facilitator” for sanctioned countries looking to do business in global markets, who used Venezuelan cryptocurrency Petro Gold for many of the transactions.

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How Miami has come to attract these sorts of international figures is largely a matter of geography and demographics. The city’s culture is inextricably tied to its location in the centre of the Americas. It is closer to many Caribbean nations than to Washington DC, and acts as a transport hub for those travelling between North and South America. It also has one of the highest immigrant populations in the country, whose experiences have probably influenced the city’s general attitude to authority. Cuban émigrés have been arriving steadily since the United States first began overthrowing their governments in the Thirties, and the ascension of Castro in 1959 meant that many new Floridians had a decidedly anti-government bent. In the Seventies and Eighties, while the rest of the world was struggling through oil shock recessions, a flood of cocaine money saw Miami transformed from a tourist outpost into a major metropolis, and a place where prosperity often has shady roots. In the past decade, Miami has become an attractive alternative to London for highly upwardly mobile Russian and Chinese citizens looking for somewhere to make a reliable investment.

But some turn to crypto out of necessity. Of US cities with over 100,000 people, Miami has the largest “unbanked” population; around one in five residents doesn’t have a bank account. This is more likely due to the enormous number of undocumented workers in the city, who live from cash payment to cash payment, than to money-laundering kingpins. And when many traditional money exchanges closed their doors during the pandemic, migrant workers turned to crypto to send back home.

This is where two very different perceptions of crypto intersect: while some Miamians sell it to achieve the good life, others use it to keep themselves and their overseas families alive. And even if some of the world’s shadiest elements are attracted to crypto, so are some of its most influential: giant Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz continues to plump for it; in its recently-released 2023 report, it called for “crypto computers, not crypto casinos”.

Next month, Miami hosts Bitcoin 2023, the annual convention that last year introduced the neutered crypto bull to the world. It has been suggested that the currency, in the intervening 12 months, could become entirely worthless — one website has tracked 473 instances of prominent people falsely declaring it dead. But those who aren’t following Bitcoin’s daily fluctuations may not have noticed that it has quietly risen almost two-thirds since last Christmas. Its association with shady money and macho risk-taking is a symptom of economic malaise rather than a sign that crypto itself is the rot. Crypto is not going anywhere.

But locals have long known that Democrats were due for a collapse. With his victory over perennial loser Charlie Crist, DeSantis transformed Miami from a cultural outpost to a diverse Republican haven heading into the 2024 Presidential election. It’s a fascinating turn for a city that has traditionally been considered more Latin American than American — one that highlights the ongoing political realignment stateside.

Miami has been trending red since 2016, when Trump made initial inroads with Hispanics, but last Tuesday’s “red wave” was a surprise. Most observers expected a modest DeSantis victory or a narrow defeat. But I was certain that DeSantis was poised for a big win. Miami has been steadily shifting rightward for years, and the city’s incompetent Democratic operatives have made matters worse by countering with woke talking points and a fake panic about “disinformation” in Spanish-language media.

The seeds of this shift were planted by the Orange Man himself. With his talk of “bad hombres” at the border and “making America great again”, Trump immediately connected with a sizeable number of working-class Hispanic Miamians, many of whom had previously been apolitical. In these early days, the county’s Right-wing crew was mostly a mix of youngish Miami bros and rabid Cuban anticommunists, who made their presence felt in the caravans that commandeered the streets and worsened already awful Miami traffic in the lead up to the 2016 election.

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This was a boisterous and fun crowd, enamored by the gaudier aspects of the Trumpian aesthetic, and it was not strictly Cuban. It was an intersectional crew of Hispanic dudes, and as the country was engulfed in flames in the summer of 2020, ladies began to join in on the fun. The Right-wing Latina was born. The caravans and boat parades leading up to 2020 were no doubt the best-looking, and most surgically enhanced, political events in American history — complete with one of the all-time great campaign songs. The city’s vibes were red hot. In 2020, Trump lost Miami-Dade County by only seven points, after losing it by 29 four years earlier. Miami was primed to go red, and soon.

As Miami began to shift Right, local progressive outfits, such as Cubanos Pa’lante, and Democratic Hispanic politicians, such as former US representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, doubled down on Latinx-style wokism and the “disinformation” gambit. Hispanic Miami, hypersexualised and constitutionally politically incorrect, is by its very nature an anti-woke city, but progressive Miami Democrats, captured and funded by the woke white Democratic establishment, cannot confront this reality head on. “Latinx” progressives, unable to deviate from the Democratic funding apparatus, could not speak up and say what they knew to be true: that the weird gender and racial obsessions of white progressives alienate working- and middle-class Hispanics.

Many Hispanics, as has been noted ad nauseum as the Rightward shift continues, are “socially conservative”. In Miami, however, such “social conservatism” often means a simple belief that men are men and women are women. The elevation of the trans woman as the embodiment of Democratic femininity was never going to play here — or with Hispanics anywhere.

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Some progressives have tried to explain the Rightward shift of Hispanics by pointing to the supposed “whiteness” of certain Latino demographics. According to woke dogma, Hispanics, especially Cuban Americans, think of themselves as white and are increasingly starting to vote that way. But this is a dodge, conveniently deflecting attention away from the fact that Democratic messaging is full of progressive extremism that appeals to the party’s elite base while alienating everyone else.

The truth is that progressives must focus on wokeness because confronting the reality of what many Hispanics believe on issues like the border, race, and gender would infuriate the elite white women who run the Democratic and media apparatus. This disconnect between the elite party brokers and working-class people of colour is most obvious in Miami, a city that prides itself on its intransigence. Due to their inability to speak honestly, Democrats ceded the most important issues for the city’s voters — crime, immigration, the economy — to Donald Trump and, later, Ron DeSantis.

If you hang around with working-class Hispanics in Miami, you’ll hear some of the most strident immigration policies imaginable: “We gotta close the border, bro. There’re too many people here already.” This isn’t a white dude from Omaha saying this, but a Hispanic guy who probably knows half a dozen people who crossed over illegally. This hardline talk has nothing to do with “whiteness” or Trumpism, but with the realities of living in a city where immigration is a constant. It’s no coincidence that Mexican-Americans living along the Southern border also flipped toward the GOP in 2020. As long as working-class reality is ignored in favor of woke talking points, a truth vacuum will be created.

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Into that truth vacuum walked DeSantis, who adopted and then refined the more popular aspects of the Trumpian brand. “Florida,” DeSantis says, “is where woke goes to die.” Like Trump, DeSantis understands that culture war issues can be winners for conservatives. Unlike Trump, he has proved that he has the focus and discipline to follow through on his rhetoric and win the ensuing battles. He went after critical race theory and gender ideology in public schools, banned medical transitions for minors, picked a fight with Disney over the company’s alleged political meddling, and passed the Stop WOKE Act, which has endeared him to traditional working-class Hispanics. According to NBC News exit polls, DeSantis not only won a supermajority of Cuban Americans but a majority of Puerto Ricans and half of other Latinos.

Of course, Hispanics aren’t the whole story here. Miami-Dade flipped in part because of their Rightward shift, but the influx of blue state lockdown refugees certainly didn’t hurt. DeSantis kept schools and businesses open, proclaimed “the free state of Florida,” and the rest is history. Tech bros flooded into Miami, as did regular Americans looking for freedom in what has traditionally been the most non-American big city in the country.

DeSantis’ strength on cultural issues, coupled with his pro-business and pro-freedom agenda, shows that big-tent Republicanism is still possible, so long as the man leading the charge is capable and competent. The expected national red wave didn’t happen, but if Republicans are smart, they’ll follow the Florida model employed by DeSantis, which will draw both working-class Hispanics and anti-woke, pro-America elites. The Trumpian approach was always going to attract the more rambunctious elements of the Republican base, but DeSantis has proven that his measured, workmanlike approach will retain the working-class types — Hispanic and otherwise — while attracting lapsed Democrats and traditional Republicans.

Miami Democrats will have to change course if they hope to retain the city, but their longstanding inability to deviate from woke talking points will make that extremely difficult. They must break from, or convince, the Democratic Party apparatus that Hispanics — the largest minority demographic in the country — are more traditionally American than they suspected.

When asked about the inspiration behind Americano last month, two weeks after its first broadcast, CEO Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo cited the 2016 election, in which Trump made massive, surprising gains with Hispanics. Recent polling suggests that the rightward drift of the demographic, on which Trump capitalised, has continued since then. There is a growing audience of conservative Hispanics, Garcia-Hidalgo points out — and what they, and America, needed was a “Fox News in Spanish”.

The first evidence of this political shift was met with incredulity by both Left and Right. But those of us on the ground had known for some time that Hispanic-Americans were turning to the Republican Party in unprecedented numbers. In my working-class Miami neighbourhood, I consistently encountered enthusiastic Trumpists. Sure, Trump was always going to attract traditionally Right-leaning Cuban-Americans, but the fervour — and the youth — of his fanatics back in 2015 and 2016 hinted at the beginnings of a new political realignment. Trump’s unorthodox style and abrasive anti-elitist rhetoric had connected with working-class Hispanics. Friends and family who were previously apolitical or tepid independents with centrist leanings had surprisingly hopped on the Trump train.

Trump may be on the fringes again, but in 2020 he gained even more support among working-class Hispanics than he had in 2016. This was a result not purely of his own qualities: since his election, the Democratic Party had alienated another Hispanic demographic. The BLM riots of 2020 were incisive: after the fire and smoke had cleared, polling showed that Hispanics, traditionally law and order types, were against the protests and strongly rejected the Black Lives Matter organisation. At the same time, Democrats were demanding that regular Americans kneel at the altar of the new social justice religion. Many Hispanic-Americans who had previously considered themselves centrist Democrats were repelled.

They might previously have been turned off by Trump’s inflammatory language; now, they were even more turned off by the actual flames destroying American cities under the guise of wokeness. They might not have been Trump supporters in 2016, but they certainly had a rabid Trumpist tio or abuelo who was now pointing at the fires and looters and saying: “See, Trump was right. Democrats want to destroy America.” Hispanics didn’t wake up en masse, but the Right-wing shift became a phenomenon that wasn’t strictly driven by Hispanic Trump supporters.

According to Garcia-Hidalgo, “the only way to save America is with the Hispanic vote” — a  sly rhetorical move that subscribes his new network to the Trumpian view that America is under attack, while positioning patriotic Hispanics as the antidote. Garcia-Hidalgo understands that conservative Hispanics, even if they still have strong ties to their homelands, essentially identify as Americans above all else. Trump understood this, too, which is why some of his more “problematic” language directed at Hispanics — the “bad hombres” rhetoric — didn’t hurt his chances with the demographic. After all, conservative Hispanics, along with the white working-class, are the last group that is unironically patriotic.

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Trump understood the power of culture war as a binding agent. While the Democrats’ socialism-tinged rhetoric became blatantly anti-American, he continued to offer an unabashedly pro-America shtick. Since many Hispanics have ties to failed socialist countries, their American dream is a simple one: they want to work hard, make some money, and be left alone in their free time. This sentiment is perhaps the greatest tenet of classic Americanism. Hispanics do not believe that the nation is illegitimate, undermined by “whiteness” or “cis heteronormativity”, or in need of a radical restructure.

The summer of 2020 may have solidified the Trump-triggered Hispanic rightward shift, but the Democratic response to the pandemic ensured its short-term viability. According to blue-state governors, it was okay to get fresh air only if you were marching for a liberal cause or torching a small business. After the riots subsided, schools remained closed, as did the small businesses left standing after the summer of BLM. All the while, Democrats elevated disconnected bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci to deity-status and robbed the little man of all agency. Working-class Hispanics, of course, were still carrying out their essential jobs throughout the entirety of the pandemic, connected to the physical reality that the laptop class had had the luxury of abandoning.

Still, now that lockdowns and mask mandates are subsiding, will the Republican’s Hispanic gains last? Outside of Trump — and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — no politician on the Right knows how to communicate effectively with Hispanics, which is why the long-term rightward shift is anything but a guarantee. Garcia-Hidalgo understands this reality, which is probably why he announced, on the Americano show “La Politica,” that presenter Maria Herrera Mellado will be interviewing Trump today.

Of course, the success of Americano isn’t tied to Trump, per say, and nor is the growing conservatism of Hispanics. Even if Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, there’s no doubt that a Trumpian “America first” sensibility plays well with Hispanics and must hold a significant role in any outlet — or movement — if the rightward shift is to continue.

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The best way for the Republicans to sustain the rightward shift is to consolidate a fragmented Hispanic demographic. The same goes for Americano. Conservative Hispanics are accustomed to regional outlets catering to mostly localised obsessions: prior to the network’s inception, the Spanish-language news options available to them were regional outlets, like Miami’s Radio Mambi. These stations cultivate their audiences for decades, through a fine-tuned understanding of what their listeners’ desire, resulting in a family-like ecosystem in which listeners and commentators build decades-long relationships. They don’t individually pull in massive numbers, but overall listenership is in the millions.

It’s tempting for a network, or a Republican politician, based in Miami to focus on the concerns of Cuban-Americans — they, and the Mexican-Americans along the Rio Grande Valley, are the two Hispanic demographics usually cited when pundits speak of the rightward shift. But if the Right strictly focuses its efforts on the interests of these groups — which sometimes, but not always, dovetail — their rhetoric will be far too insular to reach a broad-based Hispanic coalition.

In my recent listens to Americano’s programming, it’s clear that the station is in Miami, but not of Miami, which bodes well for its future prospects. Instead of placing too much emphasis on a single Hispanic group, Americano is melding “America first” Trumpian Republicanism with the socially conservative elements that have traditionally appealed to disparate Hispanic demographics. For instance, on the night I caught the 8pm show “Entre Nosotras”, the three female presenters were joined by a former officer from the Phoenix PD to discuss the border crisis and the attendant drug scourge precipitated by President Biden’s porous border policy, which is causing a “domestic war”. The Trump-like takes on immigration — which are very popular with Hispanics — and the machinegun-like, emotionally charged delivery of the presenters will appeal to old-school talk radio veterans.

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It’s worth noting, too, that many of the network’s stars — including the presenter who will interview Trump — are strong women, which highlights the savviness of the management. Recent polling has shown that Hispanic women have shifted to the Right more than any other demographic; a show that foregrounds educated Latinas is likely to be a hit. It’s also as fine a way as any to make a splash and draw in younger Hispanics, which will be the key to expanding the rightward shift and the station’s reach; younger Hispanics are still skewing progressive.

Meanwhile, Americano’s other programming, including the first show of the day, “Amanecer Con Dios” (Waking up with God), which is hosted by a priest, and “Sabor Caribeno,” which focuses on Dominican and Puerto Rican issues, speaks to a network attempting to attract disparate Hispanic elements.

The Trump campaign was likewise able to bring together the fragmented Right-wing Hispanic coalition. What’s most impressive is that the shift occurred without the help of major networks, which often serve as messaging apparatuses for the parties. In the lead up to 2020, the Trump campaign blitzed South Florida, the Texas Rio Grande Valley, and other Hispanic-heavy areas with targeted ads painting Democrats as light on crime socialists hellbent on reshaping America. But its project certainly would’ve been easier if a national Spanish-language network existed, which is why Americano’s appearance on the scene is such an interesting development. Whether or not it succeeds will reveal whether Trumpism can hold onto Hispanic voters who feel themselves drifting to the Right.

The Republican Party, then, should be watching the network’s fortunes closely. Even if Trump doesn’t run in 2024, his brand of Republicanism is so popular with Hispanics that it will play a crucial part in the election. Meanwhile, the budding Spanish-language media ecosystem can provide an insight into what the ascendant Hispanic-American conservative coalition desires — an insight the Democrats might benefit from, too.

Last week he was arrested (then released) in Washington DC, after burning a BLM flag stolen from a black church, once again confounding white Americans with his supposedly distorted racial identity. I found it hard, as I do every time he pops up in the news, not to roll my eyes at the media’s portrayal of Tarrio as some great instigator of racial discord. Because, like me, he’s a Cuban-American from Miami, which is to say that I’ve seen plenty of Tarrio-types in my day.

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Tarrio is what I’ll call a petty Miami schemer — the kind known to anyone who lives in the city, which was built on schemes and grifts in its days as a swampland backwater. In Miami, guys like Tarrio, from the personal trainer who tries to sell you steroids after your first session to the sleazy foreign investors who buy up entire high-rises, are a dime a dozen. The Proud Boys leader was first convicted, of theft, at the age of 20; nine years later, in 2013, he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for rebranding and reselling stolen medical devices. Before that, he spent some time in North Florida and ran a poultry farm. And let us not forget Tarrio’s failed 2020 congressional run.

That Tarrio leads a white supremacist group can be explained not by national race relations, but by the fact that he grew up in Miami: a place where “whiteness”, as it’s defined by the woke media class, simply doesn’t exist – for the simple reason that there are basically no white people here. It’s the only American city where Hispanics completely dominate the political and cultural landscape, and the few white people who remain no longer feel themselves to be “culturally white”. Everything in Miami, including racial dynamics, is filtered through a Hispanic lens, not an American one. Miamians don’t even consider themselves Floridians, because the rest of the state resembles Miami as much as Zimbabwe does. Those who grew up here are unrestrained by traditional ideas of race.

As a Miami cliché, Tarrio isn’t remarkably interesting. He’s merely an opportunist with some street smarts, who, due to his urban look, cuts an imposing figure. What he represents to the media class — and how they frame him — is far more interesting. The conversation about race in America always revolves around the supposed animus between blacks and whites, with other POC automatically siding with African-Americans due to some assumed melanated kinship. The fact that Tarrio is even a member, not to mention the leader, of a white supremacist group is inconceivable to most liberals. Their paradigm, in which all POC are locked in an interminable struggle against their white oppressors, removes all possibility for the fluidity and nuance with which POC, and especially Hispanics, navigate ideas of race and colour.

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In Miami, the main animus Hispanics have is with other Hispanics. The Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans have beef with one another. The Chileans and the Argentinians despise each other for reasons beyond just soccer. Hell, my people, the Cubans, have issues not only with other Hispanics, but with each other! The Cubans who immigrated shortly after Castro took power view themselves as entrepreneurial hard workers; they look down on the “newer Cubans” as lazy dope dealers and Medicare fraudsters.

These disparate Hispanic demographics, in order not to have to deal with one another, have segregated themselves into neighbourhoods where they only associate with themselves. The idea that anyone in Miami is thinking about white supremacy is preposterous; to someone like Tarrio, the “spectre of whiteness” — or any other concept used by the Left to explain American race relations — is completely foreign. Herein lies the problem with a term like “people of colour”; something as surface level as pigmentation doesn’t bind distinct subgroups into some kind of coalition.

If liberals find the impossibility of Hispanic solidarity distasteful, it’s only because they believe that kinship between groups is only achievable if all animus ceases to exist. People who live in cities where cultures are constantly clashing, Miami being the greatest example, get that a utopia in which every single group loves each other isn’t necessary. It’s only those suffering from white guilt who advocate this communal POC lovefest, because they are convinced that “whiteness” — and not natural and historic differences between groups — is what’s keeping the utopia at bay. One of the only things Hispanics seem to agree on, though, is that merely tolerating one another is often all the tolerance that’s needed. Some may find this “division” disconcerting, and maybe even sad, but if there isn’t a deep affinity among disparate Hispanic groups, there is in Miami a begrudging camaraderie that permeates personal interactions and animates the culture, and the city.

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Steeped in this culture, a figure like Tarrio, despite all his petty idiocy, has a more acute understanding of American racial dynamics than any African-American Studies major from an elite institution. The race-obsessed commentariat — the same people who’ve pushed the word “Latinx” on Hispanics in the hope of inducing an inorganic solidarity — would be mystified by the Hispanic view of blackness, if they ever bothered to listen to it. To white liberals, if a person looks black, they must automatically identify as black, which isn’t necessarily the case. A Dominican friend of mine, who is very dark-skinned and would be considered “black” by an outside observer, bristles if you jokingly call him so, quickly saying, “I’m Dominican.” Like a lot of Caribbean islanders, he’s not invested in the African-American racial project as understood by those who dominate the race conversation.

Of course, some would argue that this is a result of internalised anti-blackness. Whether that’s true or not — I don’t buy it — the fact remains that in the Hispanic world, black isn’t always black. Which goes a long way in explaining why a guy like Tarrio, who personally identifies as an Afro-Cuban, seems to suffer no cognitive dissonance in leading a white supremacist group.

What his opponents fail to understand is that Tarrio, in a twisted way, is a post-racial man. If I had to guess — and as I said, I’ve known many like him — he truly isn’t concerned with thoughts of colour and race. The only colour that matters to him is the green of the American dollar. In his albeit disturbing quest for finding the ultimate grift, he would’ve fit in just as well with Black Lives Matter as he does with the Proud Boys. He just so happened to have fallen down one internet rabbit hole and not the other.

After the recent events at the Capitol, groups like the Proud Boys will certainly be monitored more closely — and possibly even be forcibly disbanded. But Tarrio, a nasty Miami grifter through and through, will just move on to his next scheme.

The short of it is that Cuban-Americans, staunch Republicans due to the GOP’s anti-communism rhetoric, were always going to break for Trump. But the massive gains signal the birth of a broader political realignment, which aims to transform the Republican Party from a white working class party to a multicultural working class party. The coming days will show that it wasn’t merely Cuban-Americans who strongly favored the President in Miami-Dade, but also Venezuelans and Nicaraguans and other Latinos previously considered unattainable by Republican think-tankers. To put it simply, the President, to the dismay of Democrats who’ve labelled him xenophobic and racist for years, built a formidable Latino coalition.

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The driving force behind this realignment is the fact that the blue-collar sensibilities that drive the white working class also animate Cuban-Americans and other Latinos. Many Latinos, and especially Cuban-Americans, are ferociously patriotic and have a deep love for America, a country that grants them the ultimate immigrant dream: if you work hard, you get to play hard. The month leading up to the election has been one big party in Miami, with caravans, concerts, and massive boat parades. If you’ve been to one of these raucous events like I have, you realise that they have an all-American good-times NASCAR vibe to them. You might hear more Spanish than English and run into various salsa dancers, but there’s an unmistakable American energy to these get-togethers — it’s all freedom and fun and unironic Americanism.

Democrats, so often embarrassed by America’s more “uncouth” elements, are no doubt mystified by this jovial Latino Americanism, because they fail to see what is most obvious: Latinos see themselves not as Latinx, or even Latino, but as Americans.

Democrats increasingly miss the obvious due to their commitment to wokeness, an ideology that will never be popular with proud working-class Latinos. The elite media class and woke Democrats have somehow convinced themselves that in order to ingratiate themselves with Latinos they must talk down to them and act as white saviours to these poor “people of colour.” This is repellant to Latinos, but especially to Latino men, who are traditionally masculine and will never accept the victim label the woke love to thrust upon chosen minorities.

Post-election numbers will show that Latino men went for Trump in massive numbers — and not just in Miami-Dade — as the touchy feely, feminised wokeness of the Democratic Party is the antithesis of the machismo found in Latino male spaces. The Cuban-American UFC fighter and Miami resident Jorge Masvidal, who recently stumped for Trump, is a prime example of the type of guy drawn to the President’s bravado. There are many others out there like him. Masvidal, who is certainly rough around the edges and a certifiable badass, would make the Democrats cringe with his “problematic” tastes and beliefs; but he represents the young, urban Latino male — unlike the effete and focus-grouped Lin-Manuel Miranda, a Democratic Party favourite.

Which brings us to that lovely word so beloved amongst the young, hyper-woke consultants that so often set the tone for the Democratic Party: Latinx. I’m not saying that the usage of Latinx has led to the Latino realignment, but the commitment to a word that is incredibly unpopular to the group that it is supposed to signify, says it all and speaks to a greater Democratic failure: woke Democrats believe that merely assigning a group a label grants them dominion over said group.

Latinos, many of whom left countries that sought to impose their will on them, will resist this dominion at all costs. This should be common sense, but as the Democratic Party increasingly focuses on the fringe beliefs of woke elites, the failure to see the obvious will only increase. The “socialism is coming” angle of Trump’s Latino outreach, for instance, was considered fear-mongering by the Democrats, but it never occurred to them that this would be an extremely potent message to Cuban-Americans and other Latinos that had escaped repressive regimes and who actually fear socialism; instead of allaying the fears, they criticised the messaging.

It should go without saying but let me spell it out to the Democratic Party: Latinos come to America because they want to live in America, which means that they want to be Americans. They don’t want to be Latinx or “people of color” or token trinkets without agency. It’s right there in the name after all: Cuban-AMERICANAmerican. If you look, instead of label, you just might see it.