Florida Man Occupied Government vs Venezuela

The Cubans are at it again

“A prince must, therefore, go slowly in undertaking actions based upon the reports of an exile, because most often he will end up suffering either shame or very serious harm.” - Machiavelli [Discourses, II.31]

Secretary of State “Little” Marco Rubio whispering something to President Trump.

You have surely heard the war drums beating for Venezuela. It seems as if we are about to repeat the Invasion of Iraq, this time as a farce [as if it wasn’t the first time.] With no clear national security, economic, or humanitarian justification, the Trump Administration has been blowing up random boats for months and claiming the mariners are narcotrafficking agents of the Venezuelan state. Without evidence, Venezuelan President Maduro has been named the head of a drug cartel. Many of Trump’s supporters seems to be reveling in the general desire to be killing someone all the time that is deep in the American political consciousness, but few sensible arguments have been made for invading Venezuela or seeking to overthrow Maduro, a man who poses a threat to no one outside of his own country. Still, we have been teetering on the edge of war and the reasons seem no more complex than that we are currently living under Florida Man Occupied Government. As such, the Cuban exiles, led by their faithful son Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have the President’s ear and want launch a crusade to make Latin America safe for US capital. Some mad woman who was given a Nobel Peace Prize for wanting her country attacked by a foreign power is all set up to be the fake President. The bombs are already falling. The question is now just if a concentrated ethnic lobby can get Trump to take action to throw us off of this particular cliff.

Readers will know the basic story of US-Venezuelan relations, in that Chavez had his Bolivarian Revolution and since then the United States has shown unremitting hostility. Readers also likely understand that mass immigration, particularly from communist regimes sloughing off their undesirable bourgeois class and the like, has made Miami the 19th century Paris of Latin America. This is not an exaggeration: Mexico City may be much larger and economically and culturally important city, but Miami the place to be if you’re the type of person who wants to shape the future of Latin America. It has been for a long time, as you can see from this book review at The American Conservative titled “Miami’s Long Cold War.” More recently, a hit squad was put together in the city to murder the President of Haiti. Every time a Latin America comprador class is displaced they head for Miami, followed over time by the middle class and then a flood of the wretched they left behind now seeking escape. The Cubans are the most powerful faction, but the Venezuelans have showed up in droves. To Miami’s Hispanic community, socialism in Cuba and Venezuela are one struggle, though I see no reason to believe the fall of one regime means the fall of the other.

The influence of this group is outsized for a few reasons. One is that they are geographically concentrated. Another is that Florida was long a “swing state” in both state and federal politics. Now it has gone full Republican, but the Cubans are on the winning side and remain a key Republican bloc with a lot of influence and seniority. Outside of Zionist Jews, who happen to also be heavily concentrated in Florida, the Cubans are the nation’s most powerful and effective ethnic lobby, as evidenced by the fact that the United States has stood all but alone embargoing the island for some 60-odd years. While the norm is that we are made to worship the concept of “diversity” but dance around how one’s background may actually impact one’s views, with Cubans you can just say it. Look at this this LA Times story about Rubio’s success at shaping the Trump Administration’s Venezuela policy,

“The pressure campaign marks a major victory for Rubio, the son of Cuban emigres and an unexpected power player in the administration who has managed to sway top leaders of the isolationist MAGA movement to his lifelong effort to topple Latin America’s leftist authoritarians…

As a senator from Florida, Rubio represented exiles from three leftist autocracies — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and for years he has made it his mission to weaken their governments. He says his family could not return to Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution seven decades ago. He has long maintained that eliminating Maduro would deal a fatal blow to Cuba, whose economy has been buoyed by billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil in the face of punishing U.S. sanctions.”

Rubio had behaved somewhat better than I expected at the beginning of the Administration, and I had hoped it would be significant that he was no longer reliant on support from Florida’s exile community in his role as Secretary of State, but of course that was senseless optimism being as Rubio was forged in this fire and is a true believer.

Florida Republicans as a whole have also been drawn into this belief, as Cubans form an elite class within their party and have for the entire political life of most Florida Republicans active today. Of course, Donald Trump is himself now a Florida resident and has surely been rubbing elbows with wealthy Cubans at Mar-A-Lago for decades. It is not just the two of them though. The Chief of Staff Susie Wiles as well as Attorney General Pam Bondi are both of Florida. A December article from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune lists a total of 16 people nominated to positions by Trump who have ties to Florida, though I don’t know if all of them made it through. It doesn’t mention FBI Director Kash Patel, who began his legal career in Miami-Dade county, the belly of the exile beast. Notably, Trump’s nominee to be Ambassador to Colombia, as of yet unconfirmed, is also a Florida man, Dan Newlin; this is important as Colombia is currently under leftist President Petro and relations with the United States get perpetually worse. Florida man Mike Waltz was Trump’s first National Security Advisor, though Rubio took this position when Waltz got moved to become UN Ambassador, where it is his job to defend the almost universally condemned Cuba embargo.

The sad reality is that anyone who has came up in Florida Republican politics is, if not entirely integrated into the mindset of the Latin American exiles, at least used to being dependent on them and knows he will be for any future political success success. Ron DeSantis has been a competent governor and has been saying great things about restricting legal immigration, but really can’t be trusted to national office- even on legal immigration- for this very reason. Despite the countless historic examples and Machiavelli’s clear lesson, Americans over all are yet to learn that you simply can’t trust exiles to work with you on foreign policy, and we sure love letting them into our country and into our ears.

From Machiavelli,

“One must consider, therefore, how vain are both the word and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their homeland. Accordingly, with respect to their word, it must be assumed that any time they can return to their native land by any other means than with your assistance, they will abandon you and draw near to others, notwithstanding whatever promises they have made to you. As for their vain promises and hopes, their desire to return home is so intense that they naturally believe many things which are false, and to them they add many things with guile, so that between the things they believe and the things they say they believe to fill you with hope, they fill you up with so much that that if you rely upon it, you either incur expenses or undertake an enterprise in which you are ruined.” [Discourses, II.31]

Of many examples, the Bay of Pigs comes to mind; that went bad for more than one reason but what certainly didn’t happen was it leading to a general uprising, as the exiles had promised. For his part, Marco Rubio has never even been to Cuba, but has been told stories about it his whole life to the extent that restoring the island to the exile community he grew up amongst is a singular goal. Does anyone think that he is not filling Trump’s head with lies, both intentionally and unintentionally? Does anyone think that, though he has appeared loyal throughout this Administration, he would not betray Trump over this matter in favor of someone who promised him Cuba? Alternately, Venezuelan exiles old enough to be influential do remember the country, the Bolivarian Revolution having began in the late ‘90s. It was also substantially less drastic and thus initially producing a slower exile, but elites had been moving their money out of the country for decades. Regardless, as Venezuela’s status declined, ever more came here. As it goes, the upper order comes, the lower order follows. All of the kids are fed a fairy tale about these countries before their revolution. Due to DeSantis and his need to suck up to the exile communities it is now state policy, so it isn’t just the Latinos, it is all the children of Florida who must hear about this.

We need to go on a digression here before talking about the struggle within the Administration, which it does seem as if Rubio may have lost, to make sure readers understand something: countries with widespread prosperity do not support the overthrow of the state by militant socialists, be it by armed violence or through a decisive election. I cannot think of a single example; Venezuela is the one people would try to give you. The road to communism is paved with failing to make reasonable reforms to give the public a stake in the economy and society. Alternately, countries with widespread prosperity get stupid and complacent and destroy the engines of their economy over time with immigration, welfarism, and regulation. Some accounts describe this as what happened to Venezuela, saying the country was ruined through rigid labor regulations but that would seem to demonstrate the lack of a strong middle class and a country defined by great economic disparity where the poor managed to force labor protections on the rich. Regardless, in both cases its clear we’re relying on lies promoted by Florida’s exile communities about the past of these countries.

For Cuba, it is the myth of the “free Cuba” before Castro, which is taken apart in the TAC article referenced above:

“The Miami neocon myth of a “Free Cuba” prior to 1959 simply does not comport with the facts. Between 1898 and 1902 and again between 1906 and 1909, Cuba was subject to U.S. occupation, with a third, less comprehensive military intervention between 1917 and 1922. Until 1934, Washington exercised constitutional control over the island’s trade policy and reserved the right to intervene in Cuban affairs under the Platt Amendment. The island likewise ceded its monetary sovereignty to Wall Street bankers. The institution charged with central banking, the National Bank of Cuba (BNC), was in reality a private firm run by financiers from Chase, Citi Bank, and JP Morgan, many of whom engaged in rampant speculation in the island’s sugar market….For those keeping track, that leaves, at best, just 12 years of a nominally sovereign and democratic Cuban Republic.”

This was all great if you were a comprador or owned a hacienda, and it was especially great for Wall Street, the mafia, and American vacationers, but the ex ante golden age of Cuba that Marco Rubio has been taught to believe in his whole life simply isn’t real, no matter how nice it might have been for his own family. I can’t say if things are better or worse for the public now [and if they are very much the same and have simply missed the progress of 1960-2025 that would be quite bad] but obviously US policy holds a great degree of blame here. The path we have taken appears even more absurd when one compares Cuba to Vietnam where we ultimately just accepted their Communist regime and became friends and trade partners and they experienced extraordinary economic growth. Miami’s Cuban community has done everything to prevent a prosperous Cuba that they do not dominate.

Venezuela is a different case. We hear how rich Venezuela used to be, you can find that anywhere. Commonly missing is any relevant statistic about how wealth was distributed or how many people owned land, though it’s always mentioned that it had social programs paid for with oil. Gabon has one of the highest GDPs per capita on the African continent and can boast of some social and infrastructure spending, but the fact remains that the public is extremely poor and that wealth is concentrated among a ludicrously wealthy elite; people don’t go around pointing at charts and calling Gabon a prosperous state because there is no reason to. Anyway, all of these descriptions of how wealthy Venezuela used to be take 1950 as their starting point and boast of economic growth, but don’t say much of value besides that the economy was oil dependent and oil prices fluctuate and a downturn turned the public towards socialism. If we go back a decade earlier we can learn something quite valuable about Venezuela.

In his 1941 text Inside Latin America, John Gunther tells of a Venezuela where oil has been online for 20 years and which has just emerged from a bizarre and cruel dictatorship of a sort of behind-the-scenes magnate named Vincente Gomez. At this time, Venezuela had the highest wages in Latin America but was around 90% illiterate, 95% of army conscripts were diseased, and retail prices in Caracas were higher than New York City by well over 200%. Gunther’s list of key goods range from milk at 209% to fresh tree fruit at 575%. A bottle of domestic beer cost 32 cents American while an agricultural worker was paid 50 cents a day. An expert toolmaker made perhaps enough money in a day to buy 6 dozen eggs or 5 pounds of butter. An expert accountant’s annual salary was roughly the cost of an American automobile, which was also true of the median worker in America where the automobile cost around 1/4th as much. Suddenly, having a GDP per capita near America’s doesn’t sound like much. Venezuela was producing almost nothing but oil- from which the country only got 20% of the revenue out of the foreign companies doing the work, though they managed to increase it over time. Everything one needed to live on was imported at prices which the public couldn’t afford partially because of tariffs but mostly because dollars were pouring into a country where the public was extremely poor and wages in no way kept up. As Gunther writes,

“One may properly ask how ordinary people manage to live. The answer could almost be that they don’t. Venezuela, the country, is rich; the rank and file of the people are as poor as any I have ever seen.”

This he says two years after the release of his book Inside Asia, where he went to cities such as 1930’s Shanghai and Bombay.

Suddenly a chart like the one below seems misleading, because there is no way that in the 10 years following Gunther’s visit- years of incredible global turmoil where trade was severely disrupted and much of the world’s industrial production was destroyed- things got so much better that this GDP per capita statistic has any relevance in telling one the economic status of the public:

I don’t know how much higher New York City’s cost of living was than the rest of America at this time, but surely substantially.

One can find endless articles about how Venezuela shows the dangers of petrostates and socialism, but none of them will actually tell you the severity of the cost of living problem in Venezuela at the time they want you to believe it was so wealthy. Socialism has clearly been a disaster for Venezuela but nothing one reads in its economic history gives the impression that this was ever a state where the general public had any significant degree of ownership of the economy or had particularly good lives in the time before 56% of the public voted for a socialist revolutionary.

When the new Nobel “Peace” Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado wants the US to invade her country so that they can make her President and privatize oil and give it all over to multinationals, we can be sure that even if things were to get somewhat better for the Venezuelan public the key result would just be the comprador class currently holed up in Miami coming back to reap the profits while the great majority of the public sees few little benefits to whatever improvement to the GDP per capita there may be. Further, while the US exit polling firm Edison Research [which mostly operates in foreign countries with far too much US involvement, by the way] shows an overwhelming opposition victory in the last election, and the Carter Center gave a highly negative report, few compelling explanations are ever given about how the regime has endured the long-running economic crisis or survived presumably at least 65% of the public believing clearly presented data that the election was stolen.

It shouldn’t be possible in a highly urbanized country like Venezuela for a regime to survive the young people having no land or prospects and voting against the government in these numbers and then seeing the data claiming their votes are ignored- even if Maduro only awarded himself a modest 51.2% and didn’t egregiously insult the public’s intelligence. [I remain convinced the reason that Ali Bongo in Gabon was overthrown in a coup right after an election was that he claimed 64% instead of going with 51%.]

The point of all of the above is that whatever is going on in Venezuela we can assume that the right wing Latin American exile community and the oil companies have teamed up to blow smoke up our asses in service to the almighty dollar and the mythologies by which they live. They’ve certainly been doing it to Trump, who has at least been left considering if this would be a cake walk. The fact that they made up whole cloth the premise that Maduro is a cartel leader and started blowing up random boats was in and of itself enough of a clue; no evidence has been presented that fentanyl comes from Venezuela at all, and only a fairly small portion of cocaine transits the country [supporters of the policy of blowing up random ships note that most reports are somewhat outdated though also cannot produce any current evidence showing things have changed.]

Assuming they were to embark on this madness, none of the options are good. One of the top scenarios outlined is encouraging “regime collapse” wherein they harm the regime’s economic interests or internal prestige in whatever way that Maduro is overthrown. It’s not clear how any good result could possibly come from this were it to work, and it would surely only lead to more drugs and more refugees, which I suppose is fine for the Cuban mafiosos, if not for you and me. Outright attacking Venezuela in a regime change operation would be madness, which doesn’t take it off the table. Jose Nino did a good enough job writing about our military prospects as to make any efforts I would make redundant, but among key things he mentions is that Venezuela’s existing military doctrine is based on the premise of being attacked by the United States and then scattering for guerrilla warfare following an inevitable conventional defeat, leaving us to try and occupy rugged and unforgiving country with little support and hostile forces everywhere:

Why Invading Venezuela Won't Be a Walk in the Park

He also cites polling showing that over 90% of Venezuelans opposed this type of foreign intervention, even as around a supermajority do want a transition.

Regardless, as the Trump Administration drops bombs, internally they’ve been pulled back and forth while Congress refused to assert its war powers. The Special Envoy Richard Grenell, who is unpopular with many realists for reasons that were never clear to me, had been in Venezuela trying to negotiate a “solution” to whatever this problem is meant to be. It is claimed he got a deal for US access to all their resources, but it still wasn’t good enough for the hawks. What are being euphemistically called “tensions”- but are in reality unprovoked American threats- continued to rise. On the 13th we got a report that all the military officials were together discussing “options”. As Erik Sperling at Just Foreign Policy pointed out, the whole “will they or won’t they” is a bit bizarre coming almost immediately on the heels of admitting they have neither plans nor legal authority to attack Venezuela [the boat strikes have been in international waters so are essentially “just” piracy/murder, not an attack on a foreign power.] It was said that the reason they kept flying bombers near the country and our aircraft carrier entered Latin American waters is to encourage defections in the military, though as ever one is left wondering how that works if everyone knows what you’re doing.

One way or another, after all of this, Rubio, who was travelling, spoke to reporters in front of an air plane looking more or less defeated.

I must admit it is a fairly comical deflection that he says so seriously that he was in high school when they took out Noriega and wasn’t involved but refuses to acknowledge it as a relevant parallel. It’s also interesting that he notes how great cooperation with the Mexicans is going, as I explained the insanity of a drug war against Mexico 2 1/2 years ago when this whole “bomb the fentanyl” mania started. Being as Mexico is a friendly government they had to move onto to bombing the Venezuelan drugs, because Trump’s supporters do want to believe drugs are being bombed. Regardless, we got something like a commitment out of Rubio that for the time being there is no plan to overthrow Maduro. Then, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth came out and announced our new military mission:

I don’t know what the hell this means and no one else does either. Are they just giving a name to the boat strikes? Are they launching a new hemisphere-wide drug war? Does that mean they are taking down the supposed cartel leader Maduro?

It is hard to shake the feeling that how stupid war with Venezuela would be makes it more, not less, likely to happen, this still being Clown World, after all. The Florida exile community came the closest they have to a proper conflict, and I doubt they stop here. All recent indications are that these days it is fairly easy to get Trump to go full retard, and the Miami Cubans have their hooks into his entire administration and will not give up easily. All the rest of us can do is wait and see what “Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR” actually is and if it is just misguided or fully insane. For the time being, we remain one incident- or it would seem Trump mood swing- from launching a war on Venezuela and living with whatever hell it may unleash.

What else could we have expected from Florida Man Occupied Government.

Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.