The Trump administration this week pummeled Cuba with yet another round of sanctions, this time targeting its mining, construction, and metals sector. The US government continues to tighten an economic noose around the neck of the tiny island nation. This, even as the Havana regime recently enacted sweeping reforms aimed at encouraging private investment in the Cuban economy \u2014 exactly as Washington had long demanded.<\/p>\n
It remains a mystery why an administration that styles itself \u201cAmerica First\u201d has prevented third countries from selling food<\/a> 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<\/a> to supply patients on life support. The reason, in short, is that Team Trump\u2019s policy toward Cuba now is almost exclusively driven by ideology, rather than rational statecraft.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ideology, in turn, is defined by Miami\u2019s enclave of Cuban and other Latin-American exiles. Fundamentally stuck in their native lands, they\u2019re 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n You could, in fact, call it a form of Third Worldism.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism. A seminal piece of MAGA propaganda, the document argues \u2014 laughably \u2014 that Cuba represents an existential risk to Americans through its sponsorship of \u201cThird Worldism\u201d: an anti-Western animus, replacing traditional Marxism, that supposedly unites resentful foreign hordes the world over.<\/p>\n Speaking with Fox News on the administration\u2019s Cuba policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the report, stating<\/a>: \u201cTo the average American, you see Cuba, a small country \u2014 but people forget that they actually are an influence and espionage superpower.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Rubio\u2019s 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\u2019s these Miami neocons \u2014 of mostly Cuban but also Nicaraguan and South American descent \u2014 who, in a sense, refuse to assimilate to \u201cNorthern\u201d concerns and aspirations, even as they reside here. They also command disproportionate influence on US foreign policy.<\/p>\n \u00a0Within the confines of South Florida, it\u2019s hard to miss signs of Third Worldism of a more mundane variety: dead people<\/a> sign off on building inspections in the Cuban-American suburb of Hialeah; Miami\u2019s notoriously corrupt city council also attempted to cancel<\/a> 2025\u2019s municipal elections. For decades in South Florida, \u201cCocaine Cowboys,\u201d such as the infamous drug kingpin Sal Magluta, evaded justice, including one occasion when Magluta walked out<\/a> of jail after bribing officials. In the past decade, attempted overthrows of not one<\/a>, or two<\/a>, but three sitting foreign presidents were plotted by private citizens in Miami, one of which resulted in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Mo\u00efse<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, in Miami, English is a second language. Stumble upon the odd heartland tourist in Miami Beach \u2014 like my Appalachian in-laws \u2014 and you\u2019ll witness MAGA horror at the sight of hedonistic spring breakers mingling with \u201ctoo many Latins,\u201d many of whom don\u2019t appear to speak English. Indeed, they don\u2019t. Roughly 75% of residents of Miami-Dade County speak Spanish, with 25%<\/a> lacking English proficiency. Yet the irony is that many of Miami\u2019s Latin invaders are among the most fervent \u201canti-communist\u201d supporters of President Trump.<\/p>\n Enter the household of your typical MAGA Miamian for \u201ccafecito,\u201d and you\u2019re 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<\/a> every weekday, railing against the perceived enemies of US-sponsored \u201cfreedom and democracy.\u201d With an audience of around 1 million, his show, \u00a1Hola Otaola!, is interladen with infomercials for Miami-based plastic surgeons, gold chains, and \u201canti-communist realtors.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2024, Otaola ran a failed campaign for Miami-Dade county mayor. Naturally, the erstwhile Nixon and Trump consigliere Roger Stone<\/a> was an advisor; in their shared appearances<\/a>, the pair\u2019s exchanges were consistently moderated by a Spanish-language interpreter. The fact that the Otaola doesn\u2019t speak English likely cost him with English-language voters.\u00a0<\/p>\n Much the same can be said of Otaola\u2019s countless controversies over his censorious \u2014 some might say \u201cThird World\u201d \u2014 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 \u201cred list<\/a>\u201d of those who perform on the island.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2023, he staged a protest caravan<\/a> to censure a book talk, on the US government\u2019s preferential policies toward Cuban immigrants, by Boston University professor Susan Eckstein. Otaola\u2019s protesters also heckled Eckstein during the event, calling her \u201ccomunista\u201d; his student supporters naturally claimed that her presence on campus made them feel \u201cunsafe.\u201d As one Cuban-born attendee later told me, Otaola\u2019s antics reminded him of nothing so much as the Stalinist tactics used by the Havana regime to humiliate opponents, known as \u201cacts of repudiation.\u201d<\/p>\n Reacting<\/a> to the release of the Cuba Report, Otaola lauded Rubio and the State Department for documenting \u201cstep-by-step, minute-by-minute how Havana has been training, funding, and organizing [Left-wing] groups in order to destroy free societies.\u201d To be sure, the body of the report documents the very real affinities \u2014 and, in some cases, linkages \u2014 between Havana and Leftist radicals like the Weather Underground and the Democratic Socialists of America; last week, DSA co-chair Megan Romer<\/a> mouthed the revolting words: \u201cCubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a> that Marxism \u201cwas not the original battle cry of the Cuban Revolution.\u201d Instead, it was the far more insidious \u201cThird Worldism\u201d: a planetary struggle, erupting after World War II, between decolonized countries and \u201cWestern civilization itself.\u201d Never mind that Washington supported postwar decolonization in Asia and Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n Where is this stuff coming from? A possible source of inspiration may be the Cuban-American businessman Marcell Felipe<\/a>. The head of several of Miami\u2019s neoconservative jobs programs \u2014 including the media group Am\u00e9rica TeV\u00e9, Inspire America Foundation, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora \u2014 Felipe has been at the forefront of Cuban-American outreach within the MAGA Right.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 titled<\/a>, \u201cWhy Cubans Get the Marxist Threat\u201d \u2014 Felipe presaged Rubio\u2019s future report, arguing that Havana had adapted its communism in order to infiltrate US institutions via \u201ccultural Marxism.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s fusing regime change in Cuba and Venezuela with the Iran war<\/a> and the war on drugs<\/a>, 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. \u201cThird Worldism\u201d is just the latest spin on this omnicause \u2014 one which conveniently centers Cuba and Iran.<\/p>\n \u201cMiami neoconservatism is an evangelical, imperial ideology incompatible with the concept of national sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A darling of the gangsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Batista turned Havana\u2019s luxury hotels and casinos over to the US mob in exchange for a personal cut<\/a> of casino earnings \u2014 a reality fictionalized in The Godfather Part II. In turn, his CIA-trained forces killed or disappeared at least 1,500 dissident Cubans<\/a> during the 1950s. During this time, Diaz-Balart\u2019s father, Rafael, served as Batista\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The irony is that Diaz-Balart\u2019s father was a youth supporter<\/a> of Batista going back to the dictator\u2019s populist \u2014 and Communist-supported \u2014 first term in the 1940s. Batista featured members of the Marxist Popular Socialist Party<\/a> 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\u2019s pre-1960 determination that Fidel Castro wasn\u2019t a communist; a further irony is that Diaz-Balart\u2019s paternal aunt, Mirta, married Castro.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> gloss over those who aided the revolution but nonetheless were jailed or executed for opposing Castro.)<\/p>\n Instead, the congressman devotes most of his time to regime change abroad; Diaz-Balart\u2019s office features an autocrat collage<\/a> of Venezuela\u2019s Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, Iran\u2019s Ali Khamenei, Cuba\u2019s Raul Castro, and Nicaragua\u2019s Daniel Ortega with the labels: \u201cArrested,\u201d \u201cEliminated,\u201d and \u201cIndicted.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Accordingly, Diaz-Balart has celebrated<\/a> the State Department\u2019s screed against Cuban-sponsored \u201cThird Worldism.\u201d Yet much like his late relative-by-marriage Fidel Castro, the congressman has very recently embraced the anti-colonial cause elsewhere \u2014 in North Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last month, tens of thousands of Moroccan migrants swarmed<\/a> 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<\/a> that the pair \u201care not in the geographic territory of Spain.\u201d<\/p>\n Wait \u2014 what happened to anti-Third Worldist zeal here? Shouldn\u2019t an opponent of Third Worldism defend Christian Spain\u2019s honor?\u00a0<\/p>\n Nope. Contrived as they may seem, the congressman\u2019s 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\u2019s conduct in Iran; the Islamic Republic is, of course, a staunch ally of Havana. In contrast, Morocco has taken pains to ally itself<\/a> with Trump and Israel\u2019s Benjamin Netanyahu \u2014 a fact which presumably validates the country\u2019s decolonial grievances against Spain. This, even as Diaz-Balart condemns other forms of decoloniality as Third Worldism.<\/p>\n By far, the most damning aspect of Miami-neocon Third Worldism is the fact that the ideology is responsible for some of America\u2019s worst homegrown terrorists. The State Department\u2019s Cuba report rightly condemns Cuban support for Left-wing groups that carried out hundreds of bombings throughout the United States in the 1970s. \u201cIn one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972,\u201d the report notes, \u201cthe FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In the same decade, authorities linked Cuban-Americans to 113 bombings in the United States, including the 1976 car bombing<\/a> of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, conducted in concert with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet\u2019s 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 Coordinaci\u00f3n 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 \u201cpatriot and hero<\/a>\u201d upon his release.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s choice of Rubio as secretary of state. As MAGA apostate Pedro Gonzalez has argued<\/a>, moreover, Trumpism can sometimes display the aspects of a Third World movement; last December, Miami-Dade\u2019s Hialeah suburb announced<\/a> the construction of a bronze, 12-foot statue of \u201cDonald Trump the Fighter.\u201d Whether in rhetoric or substance, Trump resembles<\/a> many hostile and friendly Latin American caudillos.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s neoconservative Latinos would do well to emulate their Mexican-American peers. Aside from a handful of US-based elite Mexicans<\/a>, most Mexican-Americans \u2014 many of whom have lived in the United States for centuries \u2014 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%<\/a>, compared 59%<\/a> of Cubans and 51%<\/a> of Venezuelans.<\/p>\n Until Miami neocons assimilate into the American polity by renouncing their faith in regime-change wars \u2014 and learning English \u2014 they will inevitably entangle the rest of us in the petty grievances of America\u2019s Magic City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration this week pummeled Cuba with yet another round of sanctions, this time targeting its mining,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[153051,1016,153052,8877,123,125,153053,124,153054],"class_list":["post-381408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-alexander-otaola","tag-cuba","tag-marcell-felipe","tag-marco-rubio","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-neocons","tag-miami-news","tag-third-worldism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}