By Kirk C. Nielsen, FloridaBulldog.org
Disillusion with President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly set in among Cuban exiles in South Florida, nine months after U.S. special forces invaded Caracas, seizing Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and killing 32 Cuban soldiers providing security for them.
The January 3rd operation, which stunned the closely allied authoritarian regimes in Caracas and Havana, triggered a new phase of serious fantasizing among Miami’s Cuban exile population that a U.S. invasion of Cuba to remove the regime there could be imminent. Trump, who has been so wildly popular among Cuban exiles as to turn Miami-Dade County from blue to red and to inspire mile-long flag-waving MAGA car and pickup truck convoys, and the Hialeah city council to name a street after him, had stoked the fantasy early this year by suggesting he intended to order an invasion of the island.
But for many exiles the war fever has morphed into disaffection and anger at Trump, cracking one of his most devoted political bases in South Florida for the first time.
Evidence of the fracturing has been abundant on South Florida’s Spanish talk radio shows, whose hosts and listeners have skewed heavily pro-Trump for a decade. The shows, which reach tens of thousands of people over AM airwaves and internet streams via stations’ apps, websites, and Facebook sites, serve as a kind of rarified focus group amid a Cuban exile media landscape flooded with a multitude of loquacious YouTubers and Facebook reelers. (More than one million Cubans and 250,000 Venezuelans live in South Florida. Precise data on how many plug into that fragmented landscape, and where, is unavailable.)
Omar Moynelo, the jocular host of a noontime show on Salem Media-owned La Nueva Poderosa (“The New Powerful One” 990 AM) has likened the situation to the distrust a guy feels when a girlfriend dumps him and then comes back to him months later.
“And she says, ‘Now, yes, we’re going to build something very beautiful.’ But now you don’t believe her because she left you and she took a long time,” he said during his August 6 broadcast. “Here this is happening to a lot of people.”
One of them, an agitated elderly-sounding man, presumably a Cuban Republican, called in to Moynelo’s program to vent about Trump and Rubio.
“December is going to catch us still in this nonsense! Nothing is going fall! They’re not going to go in militarily, they’re not going to go in to do anything, even less with the [midterm] elections,” the caller yelled in Spanish. “Two marines die and we lose the House and Senate. They’re not going to do anything. They don’t have vision, they don’t have anything planned, and this is a disaster. It’s sad! It’s embarrassing! But this is the nonsense we’re in with these people.”
Many months have passed since Trump posted his first threat of Cuba on January 11, eight days after the Caracas operation: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.”
In response, the leadership in Havana immediately launched its own war of words on social media platforms and state-run outlets, insisting the Cuban government has always been open to dialogue but would fight any invasion to the death.
Foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez posted (in Spanish) on X that Cubans on the island “will defend their nation against any imperialist aggression. For this land we are willing to give our lives.”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel declared on X and elsewhere, “Cuba is a free, independent and sovereign nation and no one dictates what we do. Cuba doesn’t attack, but is attacked by the U.S. for 66 years, and doesn’t threaten, [but] prepares, willing to defend the Fatherland (Patria) to the last drop of blood.”
Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz followed suit with an X post claiming the U.S. has always been bothered by “our profound conviction to be an eternal Baragua,” a town in central Cuba where on March 15, 1878 Cuban general and independence fighter Antonio Maceo rejected a peace deal with Spanish generals because it didn’t address independence for Cuba or the abolition of slavery. Historians credit Maceo with saying: “Whoever attempts to seize Cuba will only reap the dust of its blood-soaked soil, if they do not perish in the struggle.”
THE EXILE AIRWAVES
On the exile airwaves, commentators were bullish about an invasion and ridiculed the Havana regime’s bellicose rhetoric. “Blood will have to flow” was a popular refrain from callers, while others were certain that if U.S. troops landed, Cuban civilians and soldiers would run to hug them.
On January 12, with excitement from the Caracas operation still swirling, the cohosts of an afternoon show, La Resistencia, on locally owned America Radio (1260 AM), Andres Reynaldo and Miguel Cossio, envisaged a similar assault in Cuba.
“The Cuban Maduro is in reality Raul Castro Ruz,” Cossio reasoned, referring to the 95-year-old retired armed forces minister, former president, and brother of the revolution’s late commander-in-chiefFidel Castro.
They also imagined that Cuba’s current armed forces chief, Alvaro Lopez Miera, and interior minister, Lazaro Alvarez Casas, might well be thinking about how to flee.
“I don’t know if they might have a very concrete plan in which when they learn the first [U.S.] planes have taken off, they can go leave in theirs,” Reynaldo wondered.
On a February 10 show, with war fever still high on the airwaves, Reynaldo suggested that Cubans need “a military Christianity” to overthrow the government.
“Oh, you want a Crusade,” Cossio joshed back.
They’d been reading Facebook posts from the island by a Catholic priest, Alberto Reyes, one of which had called for — not war — but speaking out for a “free, democratic, plural” Cuba with “liberty, justice, and truth.” Father Reyes paraphrased a line from the Book of Luke: “Stand up, raise your head, your liberation is near.”
On-air analyses sometimes drifted into reveries that Father Reyes’s words could arouse antigovernment protests on the scale of the July 11, 2021 island-wide street demonstrations, which police and security forces quickly quelled, imprisoning hundreds. Only now, Trump would send in U.S. armed forces to protect the protesters and topple the government.
But on February 18 Axios broke news that Secretary of State Rubio had secretly opened a dialogue with Raul Rodriquez Castro (aka Raulito and El Cangrejo), a Cuban army colonel who runs security for his grandpa, the 95-year-old Raul Castro. The elder Raul wields a murky degree of power — nobody seems to know for sure — owing to his history as head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces from 1959 to 2008, when his ailing older brother Fidel (who died in 2016) and the National Assembly of the People’s Power awarded him the presidency, which he handed to Diaz-Canel in 2018. The elder Raul retired from his post as first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party in 2021.
News of dialogo – tantamount to treason for many exiles – was the first slap in the face from the Trump-Rubio approach to Cuba: threatening war one week and promoting talks the next. Some hosts and callers were forgiving since that approach also piled new sanctions on top of decades-old ones and blockaded oil and natural gas from an island already destitute of gasoline and electrical power. Hard to ignore, though, was that under exceptions to the U.S. trade embargo tens of millions of dollars of food and agricultural products, medical equipment, batteries, housewares, automobiles (gasoline and electric), and other goods were legally flowing each month into Cuba, mostly from Miami, possibly helping the regime.
FEBRUARY SURPRISE(S)
Meanwhile, ten Cuban exiles in South Florida couldn’t wait for the president to order an attack, such was their feverishness. On February 25 the men cruised from the Florida Keys to the northern coast of Cuba, in two motorboats, according to inside accounts. Ten members of an obscure group calling themselves Auto Defensa del Pueblo (The People’s Self Defense) were aboard just one 24-foot motorboat — the other had broken down — when they opened fire on a Cuban patrol boat that intercepted them.
The border guards killed four of the exiles, captured six others (one died later from his wounds), and collected a boatload of high-caliber rifles, telescopic sights, shotguns, handguns, ballistic vests, camouflage uniforms and backpacks with Auto Defensa patches, boots, helmets, an electric generator, a satellite communications unit, walkie-talkies, bags of shotgun shells, and two large white plastic coolers filled with thousands of bullets. Cuban police had already arrested an eleventh Auto Defensa member who they said confessed to a plan to meet the others inland and proceed to try to spark a rebellion.
The war fever even affected one exile leader who normally promotes peaceful engagement.
“They went to free their country,” Ramon Saul Sanchez, septuagenarian head of the exile group Movimiento Democracia (Democracy Movement), said by phone to the host of a morning call-in show on La Nueva Poderosa. “They will always be an inspiration to those of us who continue fighting, and I’m sure to the next generations who are coming,” Sanchez intoned — paradoxically, because after parting ways with anti-Castro terrorist groups in the 1980s he founded Movimiento Democracia to advocate for non-violent democratic change in Cuba.
The host, Alberto Cutie, a former Catholic priest turned opinionated Episcopal minister, mocked the Cuban government’s portrayal of the incursion as an attack on Cuba’s sovereignty. “It was just a little fishing boat,” Cutie assured listeners.
News of the deadly boat encounter drew more on-air calls from listeners clamoring for a U.S. invasion and indulging their belief that a protest, or even a successful ten-man incursion, could ignite an uprising across the island big enough to crack the authoritarian state. If that happened, many seemed to think, Trump would certainly send in troops.
But suddenly something unbelievable clouded visions of an imminent U.S. invasion of Cuba. Three days later, on February 28, Trump stunned even his most loyal fans with Operation Epic Fury, as U.S. warplanes launched daily bombings on Iran, killing hundreds of Iranians, from government leaders to children. On-air excitement about an invasion of Cuba dwindled, and talk shifted to the need for patience while Trump handled Iran.
KEEPING HOPE (FOR A BLOODBATH) ALIVE
Still, the president managed to keep reviving exiles’ hopes for U.S. military fury in Cuba. At the White House on March 16 he told reporters he believed he would have “the honor of taking Cuba.” Eleven days later, at the Faena hotel in Miami Beach for a conference sponsored by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, he boasted about the success of the Venezuela operation and added, “Cuba’s next.”
And once again hosts, analysts, and callers on the exile airwaves sounded thrilled.
Two Miami area Republicans running for reelection to the U.S. House this fall, both Cuban-American, fueled invasion fantasies, despite the likelihood that military action would cause much more carnage in Cuba than in Caracas.
Asked by a local Telemundo 51 television interviewer whether he supported a U.S. invasion of Cuba, Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-26) said in Spanish, “I think that for the national security of the United States, not to say for the Cuban people, the elimination of that dictatorship is essential.”
“Even if it involves civilian deaths?” the interviewer, Gloria Ordaz, pressed.
“One always has to try to avoid the death of civilians,” Diaz-Balart replied.
Carlos Gimenez (FL-28) equated Cuba’s socialist government to a cancer afflicting Cubans on the island, a popular cliche in exile punditry, and collateral damage was to be expected. “You know, sometimes the cure is hard on the patient, but at the end the cancer is gone. So that regime has to go,” he said (in English) on CNN in May.
Miami’s third Cuban-American representative, Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27), also a pro-Trump Republican, dodged the issue, saying an invasion won’t be necessary because the Havana regime will somehow fall on its own, but never outright opposing a U.S. attack or promoting peace.
But soon dialogo was again in the air. On May 14 news broke that CIA director John Ratcliffe had just flown to Havana and met with Raulito Castro and Interior Minister Lazaro Alvarez Casas. They discussed economic stability, intelligence cooperation, security issues, and ending Cuba’s status as a safe haven for U.S. adversaries.
Hosts, analysts, and callers tried to puzzle through whether the meeting represented more pressure on the regime or some kind of cahoots with it.
More pressure, they could soon conclude. Six days later, U.S. Justice Department
officials unsealed a new indictment of Raul Castro for authorizing two Cuban MiG pilots to destroy two Cessna planes flying toward Cuba in 1996, resulting in the deaths of four Brothers to the Rescue members. Pro-war exiles could again imagine another U.S. special forces raid like Operation Absolute Resolve in Caracas in January, but targeting Raul Castro in Havana.
“In order to face trial they have to go get him,” reasoned a man who called into Ninoska Perez-Castellon’s afternoon show on La Nueva Poderosa to seek clarity.
“Clearly,” Perez-Castellon replied.
“Then it’s the same as Maduro,” the caller concluded.
“They can do many things,” the host cautioned. “Maybe they do it another way. I don’t have the interiorities of how they’re going to do it. The road that an indictment opens is that they can go get him when they want.”
Instead of getting Raul Castro, though, Secretary of State Rubio only heralded more sanctions, aimed at stifling government-run businesses and punishing high-level members of the regime, including President Diaz-Canel and Raul Sr.’s son, Alejandro Castro Espin.
SUMMERTIME MADNESS, AS IN ANGER
In June, when Diaz-Canel announced dozens of new laws to privatize some state-run sectors of the island’s economy — one apparent goal of Rubio’s — the Trump administration hit the regime with more sanctions.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth kept visions of possible U.S. military action in Cuba in the news, and thus on the airwaves, with a June 10 trip to the U.S. military base in Guantanamo to train with soldiers.
“It would be unwise for the government of Cuba to try to procure or get access to the types of weapons that could reach this base or the American homeland,” Hegseth said, dressed in a green T-shirt and black shorts for workouts with troops. “They would be inviting the kind of confrontation not only do they not want, but they could not stand.”
In a June 19 X post, Rep. Gimenez sounded even more gung-ho than Hegseth: “We’re not buying what the Castro regime is selling. The dictatorship must be destroyed & relegated to the ash heap of history!”
But as the summer progressed, some pro-invasion exiles were no longer buying the warmongering of their elected leaders. Trump’s months-long, on-and-off war against Iran had repeatedly dashed their dreams of U.S. missile strikes and boots on the ground in their former homeland 200 miles south Miami.
What had been a hermetically sealed Spanish language media sphere of Trump loyalty since 2016 was now punctured. Many callers still professed adoration for the president. But one could hear an uptick in the number of callers swearing not to vote for Republicans again or simply not vote again. An upsurge in deportations of Cubans and Venezuelans lacking legal U.S. residency further inflamed the outrage toward Trump and Rubio, a West Miami native.
“Where is the freedom for the Venezuelans? Not there! There is none!” complained a woman who called into Alberto Cutie’s morning show in June, noting she’d voted for Trump twice but now regrets it. “What this man has done with immigration has been intolerable. Everything that this man has done, the division, the betrayal he’s done to the Venezuelan people and that now he wants to do with Cuba, too. Having meetings with murderers. With those people one doesn’t dialogue! With those people one takes action!”
Worse for those wanting war, the first shipment of $100 million in humanitarian aid the administration had approved back in May started arriving in Cuba in late July.
Hosts tried to hold the line, in favor of providing Trump and Rubio slack on Cuba until the president finished up his off-and-on again war with Iran.
“We want not only this aid that Marco Rubio sent, but we want an invasion with troops that Marco Rubio has to send to begin this process of recuperation,” Moynelo maintained on his July 27 noontime show on La Nueva Poderosa. He had just read aloud a listener’s comment on the station’s Facebook page: ABAJO LA DICTADURA! (DOWN WITH THE DICTATORSHIP!)
The next caller, an aggravated woman, corrected the host, telling him that in the U.S. the president, not the secretary of state, is responsible for ordering an invasion — and she was clearly impatient with the commander-in-chief.
“Tell Trump he has to get rid of communism in Cuba!” she shouted. “But when is he going to? When Christopher Columbus comes back again?”
Hosts spent long hours on the air conjuring scenarios in which Trump would actually send in troops, ridiculing the Havana government’s efforts to find ways out of the island’s economic and humanitarian crisis, and appealing for listeners to dig deep for patience and continue backing Republicans in the November midterms.
In August Cossio, the afternoon America Radio host, spoke favorably of new remarks by Secretary of State Rubio that “patience and persistence” are key in foreign policy and that by the end of Trump’s term Cuba would be on an “irreversible glide path to a different future.”
“I think that this is a strategy of pressure from all sides with different actors,” Cossio surmised in an August broadcast. As if to add credence to the Trump-Rubio approach, Cossio added, “Yesterday the federal congressman Mario Diaz-Balart told us here that he would bet his house that by the end of the Trump administration we would see the change we want in Cuba.”
Talk of a greatly extended timeline — til the end of 2028 — was another slap in the face for war-hungry exiles. As Cossio acknowledged to listeners, “In some circles the persistence theme did not go down well.” They would have to take succor in an abundance of talk about the ills of the Revolution, the island’s food shortages and power outages, the U.S.-imposed fuel blockade, new rounds of sanctions, and other forms of pressure — such as a CIA task force created to find fissures within the Havana government among anti-American hardliners and pragmatists willing to consider Trump’s demands.
A New York Times article publicizing the task force was the theme of Moynelo’s August 6 show on La Nueva Poderosa, a Trump move that the host spun as yet another sign of hope for pro-invasion exiles that the president hadn’t ditched them.
“The girlfriend took a long time,” Moynelo said, following through with his metaphor. “But once again we are excited. (Nos ilusionamos.) We don’t have anywhere else to turn. One has to be excited with Trump.”
OCTOBER VOTER CRISIS
Ever more listeners, though, seemed resolved never to take Trump back.
“I’m not sayings bombs, I’m saying missiles are what they have to fire there,” one of Moynelo’s female listeners told him on September 4. “But they are taking too long. This is getting tiring.”
On Alberto Cutie’s September 8 morning show, a rattled male listener told him, “This Republican Party — I am Republican — doesn’t represent me at all. You think I’m going to cast a vote for this empty, torpid, stupid, mediocre reality that is happening in this country? I’m not going to cast it for Democrats. But I’ll sit out, calmly.”
In mid-September the three hosts of La Nueva Poderosa’s often cacophonous morning call-in show, Fuego Cruzado (Cross Fire), had little to say to a male caller whose lengthy rant summed up the rising anti-Trump sentiment in the president’s Cuban exile base.
“I’m Republican. I voted for Trump three times, I voted for Marco Rubio, things I now regret because Cuba is there bleeding out!” the caller shouted. It was “immoral” for the administration to open Alligator Alcatraz, the now-closed ICE detention center in the Everglades, “where there are crocodiles and snakes as if to say that Latin Americans are worthless!” he continued.
The caller then denounced Trump and Rubio for sending humanitarian aid to Cuba without having removed Raul Castro first. “They should have dragged him out by the hair after having condemned him, and they don’t do anything!” he yelled.
He added: “They are immoral, señores! I’m not going to vote for anyone again if Cuba isn’t free this year! Muchas gracias!”
With the midterms looming, hosts and many callers kicked into get-out-the-vote gear, imploring listeners to cast aside their discontent with Trump and vote Republican, because letting Democrats win would be a fate worse than capitulation on a Cuba invasion. Some maintained that socialist infiltrators have taken over the Democratic Party, others that Democrats actually are communists, just like the regime in Havana.
But anger at Trump’s immigration policy could interfere with those voter turnout arguments.
On his four-hour afternoon show on locally owned Actualidad Radio (1040 AM) October 7, longtime host Augustin Acosta railed at the president’s unhinged anti-immigration policy. Acosta, who two years ago was still pushing Trump’s and other Republican leaders’ stolen 2020 election claims (including conspiracy theories involving rigged Dominion voting machines), offered a five-minute critique as sensible as any serious Democrat’s.
“Everyone said, ‘How great that we’re going to clean out all those undesirables,’” Acosta recalled, describing the Miami exile community’s reaction to Trump’s campaign promises to deport Venezuelan, Mexican, and Central American gang members and all kinds of criminals. “But nobody suspected, because it wasn’t announced, it wasn’t ever said, that [ICE agents would target] working people, people in a process of family reunification, people in a political asylum process.”
Acosta added that ICE agents had arrested 509 U.S. citizens and even deported some, then continued his critique for another minute — not fantasizing about war in Cuba, at least not that hour, just describing a violent reality here at home.
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