On January 3, my corner of the country woke up overjoyed upon hearing the news of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s capture. However, it soon became clear to me that this reaction was far from universal. Indeed, the disquiet here at Tufts is a world apart from the jubilation of my native Miami. Therefore, I thought I might offer the budding international relations scholars in our community a different perspective by shining a light on the South Florida experience.
My grandmother Caridad left Cuba for New York City mere months before the United States broke off diplomatic relations with the island nation in 1961. Associated as they were with Cuba’s reviled Batista regime, her family was forced into exile with 250,000 others, who formed the first exodus of Cubans to the United States. By the time my great-grandmother Zaira and great-aunt Miriam resolved to leave Havana, though, it was impossible to obtain a visa to the United States. So, instead, they sailed southward, along with 40 nuns banished by Fidel Castro, to Venezuela.
Whereas Cuba stood at the precipice of its descent into totalitarianism, Venezuela was basking in the dawn of a nascent 40-year-long democratic experiment. For the remainder of the 20th century, Venezuela’s robust—albeit imperfect—two-party system shone in glaring contrast to the political violence and despotism that engulfed Latin America during the Cold War.
Indeed, my aunt never forgot the three months she spent in Caracas, a city that reminded her of the glitzy Havana of her adolescence. After the rise of Hugo Chávez at the turn of the millennium, those memories of Venezuela grew more poignant still. For it was then that illiberalism, draped in the beguiling rhetoric of revolution, had taken root in Venezuela. To date, nearly 8 million people have fled the economic calamity and political repression wrought by Chavismo. Like the Cubans before them, several hundred thousand Venezuelans ended up in South Florida, just as my father’s family had in the mid-1960s.
In my lifetime, I have been touched by the stories of many such Venezuelans: Mónica Linke, a civil engineer turned algebra teacher; Ingrid Krilewski, a tenured professor turned Spanish teacher; Luis Ramos Reyes, a persecuted supreme court justice turned janitor. The first exiles believed that their country’s turn of fortune would be temporary. It wasn’t. Most of them have since passed on, and their progeny forsook hope of regime change long ago.
Yet that despair is precisely what animates the solidarity between Miami’s Cubans and Venezuelans. Shared experiences have given rise to a shared conviction: history mustn’t repeat itself. Venezuela mustn’t suffer Cuba’s fate. So it was, on that morning of January 3, that my city celebrated as the news of Nicolás Maduro’s capture spread. I myself shared in this mood. That is, until our president started talking.
President Donald Trump dismissed opposition leader Maria Corina Machado as lacking “the support within or the respect within the country” to lead. That is nonsense. Machado united Venezuela’s notoriously fragmented opposition by winning its primary with 93% of the vote. When Maduro barred her from running in the general election, she became the kingmaker whose chosen candidate won by over 30 points. Her publication of proof of Maduro’s 2024 election fraud won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025. But Donald Trump is not concerned with who the Venezuelan electorate and diaspora respect. He prefers the men with the guns, Diosdado Cabello and Vladimir Padrino López. For the only thing that Donald Trump respects is power, which, in his mind, is derived from the barrel of a gun. He has bigger guns than the Chavistas; Machado has no guns. The result? Trump alone can fix it.
Early on in his presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is purported to have said of Nicaragua’s dictator, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Today, Trump is restoring a system of unvarnished self-interest where “might makes right” and big countries install pliant tyrants in small countries. Roosevelt ultimately shunned such hubris. In the Atlantic Charter, he and Winston Churchill made known certain common principles on which they based their hopes for a better future for the world. Among those principles was “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” Venezuelans lost that right long ago, which is why Maduro’s removal gave them hope. To bait-and-switch them would be cruel.
As ever, process-obsessed Democrats are missing the point: they have been given an opportunity. They must stop debating the wisdom of Maduro’s capture and the intimidation campaign that led up to it. What’s done is done. Now is the time to combat the president’s worst impulses, and to make plain that democracy is the only acceptable outcome.
Photo: White House via EPA