“De Miami para el mundo: los cubanos de ultraderecha” first appeared on CTXT on February 27, 2026. The following is the English translation of a revised, expanded, and adapted version of the original Spanish text.
“In times of digital transnationalism, all borders are porous. Any monologue laden with misinformation recorded in Hialeah quickly spreads to Havana. The massive arrival of the internet on the island would serve millions of Cubans on a silver platter to the Cuban-American political and media propaganda apparatus. It is revealing how the US government itself went from preventing Cuba from accessing the internet through technological embargoes before 2010 to creating a Cuba Internet Task Force in 2018 aimed at promoting Cubans’ access to the Web.”
— Iramís Rosique
Judging by the behavior of many Cuban migrants, it might seem that they ardently and unconditionally support Donald Trump in his attempt to bring Cuba to its knees through the energy blockade that the United States has imposed on the island. This mirage, so necessary to legitimize the United States’ aggressively hostile policy toward Cuba, is due to the radicalization of part of the Cuban diaspora at the hands of the far right, as well as to the monopoly of public discourse that this sector has achieved to the detriment of other competing discourses and, above all, of the public discourse and the nation-State narrative to which Cubans living on the island were exclusively attuned for fifty years.
When, in early 2013, Raúl Castro’s government reformed and relaxed Cuban immigration legislation and eliminated for good the so-called “exit permit,” or official authorization to travel abroad or permanently leave the country, the harshest voices in Cuban-American politics in South Florida—such as congressman Mario Díaz-Balart and former congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both Republicans—were alarmed and immediately warned that Cuban immigration privileges would have to be reviewed in order to prevent the United States from being flooded, in this new context of free mobility, with “reds” and faced with “disruptive” consequences for U.S. politics and economy.
Such predictions tapped into the fear that new waves of Cuban migrants who would have been born and spent their entire lives under the Revolution would arrive in the United States with more progressive political views or at least more critical positions toward the so-called “historic exile.” The new realities observable nowadays in South Florida have shattered such hypothesis. Over the last decade, we have witnessed an accelerated radicalization of the most recent Cuban emigration toward the most extreme strains of the American far right.
Far from toning down conservatism, the new migrants have become the most fervent supporters of Trumpism and vociferously hardline policies toward Cuba and even beyond the “Cuban problem.” And yet this phenomenon is not merely an electoral curiosity confined to Miami-Dade County; it is a process of ideological hegemony that radiates, through social media and the vast political and economic power amassed by the Cuban-American diaspora, toward the “peripheral diaspora” in Latin America and Europe, and directly impacts the heart of the island.
Identity by opposition
To understand the assimilation of Cuban migrants into the ranks of the American and international far right, it is essential to analyze the material and psychological shock of arriving in the US capitalist system, especially in a city like Miami. Recent migrants are not fleeing the expropriation of large landowners, manufacturing or importing industries, and real estate assets, as the Cuban bourgeoisie did in the 1960s, but rather chronic shortages, the deterioration of public services, and the Cuban State’s discourse of endless stoicism and resistance. In this sense, Miami has been for decades—for better or worse—an “anti-Cuba”: what is not possible on the island is possible in Miami. To be accepted by the Miami elite and shed the stigma of being a “newcomer,” migrants quickly assimilate the hyper-individualism and political radicalism of their new consumerist environment, thereby exorcising their “Communist” past—however actively or passively they might have been involved with and in it—and purifying themselves.
The mere act of migrating does not produce these ideological dislocations and transmutations. It is true that migrants arrive in a host community with strict rules and entrenched hierarchies that encourage the strengthening of some political identities over others. But it must be added that the wave of Cuban migration after 2020 is made up of Cubans who lived—and probably believed in—the promises of a “prosperous, democratic, and sustainable socialism” that Raúl Castro’s economic reform and the normalization of relations with the United States during the Obama administration were supposed to make come through.
Instead, for whatever reason, they left a country that not only failed to meet the expectations of those promises, but which was also regressing in terms of quality of life below the starting point of the 2011 economic reform. So they left not only disappointed, but also aggrieved. For a whole decade (2011-2021) many of these people had accessed and adapted to a standard of living that collapsed overnight, as if someone had snatched it away from them. Social anger is not usually directed at abstract objects such as the US government’s “unilateral coercive measures,” but at specific figures to whom ill intention or mere incompetence and blame can be attributed: in this case, the Cuban government and everything it represents, or claims to represent.
This situation is channeled and exploited by Florida’s solid Republican bloc. Figures such as the current Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and U.S. Representatives such as María Elvira Salazar and Carlos A. Giménez function as political translators of this migratory trauma. The conservative media apparatus has managed to establish and entrench a false semantic equivalence: any notion of welfare State, social justice, or social rights with a class perspective is immediately emptied of its meaning and repackaged as a precursor to “Castroism.” While generations of migrants after the 1990s claimed to have left the island for economic reasons and had a more conciliatory view of bilateral relations between Cuba and the United States, today’s migrants claim and swear that they are political victims of communism.
Cuban-American Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) during an interview on 31 January 2026 on Fox Business in which she claims that “the Cuban regime is the epicenter and the headquarters of evil in the Western Hemisphere” (sic).
This mechanism has created a paradoxical electoral phenomenon in which a community formed through migration has ended up endorsing Trump’s policies of mass deportation. Anti-communist panic prevails over class interests and immigration status. Voting for the Democratic Party or aligning themselves or merely sympathizing with progressive social movements is tantamount to “opening the door to communism,” which “forced” them to emigrate. Ironically, this is compounded by the seductive appeal of the “strong man” figure. The MAGA movement has exploited the political culture in which many Cubans grew up: the centrality of the charismatic leader and the importance of loyalty as a sign of identity. Thus, we see a political affection emerging around Trump that, despite all the differences and provided that one overcomes the repugnance of such comparison, is reminiscent of a kind of perversely inverted “Fidelism.”
Echo chamber and machine of resentment
Such radicalization does not occur in a vacuum: it is cultivated in a media ecosystem unique to the United States. Miami is a permanent laboratory of disinformation of the most shamelessly cynical or self-deluded kind ever harbored for political ill intent and subversive purposes in the United States. The language of this ecosystem is so hyperbolically implausible that its immediate and prolonged effect is to shut down any possibility of counterargument. It is impossible to respond to such disproportionate lies without lending them, even by default, credibility and belligerence. Miami’s archetypical Homo Cubans is for all political and psychological purposes an anthropological mutant. Historically dominated by the traditional far right through radio and TV, the airwaves of Miami’s media ecosystem have given way to a much more widespread and aggressive digital phenomenon: social media influencers, in a local adaptation of the tactics of the American Alt-Right promoted by strategists such as Steve Bannon, who saw Florida’s Hispanic working class as fertile ground for conservative populism.
Someone who could epitomize the success of this model of resentment and constitutive misrepresentation—and who is very well known to all Cubans inside and outside Miami—is influencer Alexander Otaola, whose program ¡Hola! Ota-Ola was initially nothing more than a space dedicated to talking show business and entertainment but which during Trump’s first term in office ceased to be a simple gossip program of very dubious taste and became a platform for political activism that called around the clock for a hardening of Washington’s policy toward Havana and practiced then most vicious media harassment against public figures of Cuban migration who did not exhibit a clear opposition to the Cuban government. The alignment with Trumpism was so direct that Otaola staged his own ideological conversion by resigning from the Democratic Party live on air and joining the Republican Party in front of his audience. From then on, his program became not only a means of propaganda, but a real instrument of political discipline for the voices of Cuban migrants.
Alongside Otaola, a host of other digital activists emerged who helped reverse a trend that had been tormenting Republicans. According to FIU Cuba Poll records, the Republican Party had gone from dominating 70% of the Cuban American electorate in the early 1990s to accounting among its supporters for only 53% of such electorate by 2016. Furthermore, in 2014, FIU studies revealed “alarming” data regarding Obama’s new policy: 88% of Cuban Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 and 55% of all registered voters favored the “thaw” policy and the normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba. The media and political offensive, in which these influencers played a key role, took advantage of the MAGA momentum to “correct” the ideological diversification among Cuban migrants and reestablish the Republican monopoly: support for Trump among Cuban voters in Miami-Dade County in 2024 reached a historic high of 68%, and isolationist positions toward the Cuban government regained lost ground.
The greatest triumph of this propaganda machine lay in the fact that its reach did not stop on the coast of Florida. In times of digital transnationalism, all borders are porous. Any monologue laden with thorough misrepresentation if no outright disinformation or any call for a boycott recorded in Hialeah quickly spreads to Havana and most of Cuba. Although for some time the Cuban leadership jealously shielded its traditional media to prevent a Soviet-style glasnost, it did not foresee that the massive arrival of the internet on the island would pierce that “protective shield” and serve millions of Cubans on a silver platter to the Cuban-American political and media apparatus. It is revealing how the US government itself went from preventing Cuba from accessing the internet before 2010 with technological embargoes to creating a Cuba Internet Task Force in 2018 aimed at promoting Cubans’ access to the Web.
The Cuban-American far right has thus managed to export its ideological conceptual frameworks. The legitimate frustrations of the island’s citizens in the face of shortages, inflation, or government mismanagement are quickly captured and decoded through the lens of Miami’s far right. From there, they establish what it means to be an “activist” or an “opponent,” an “officialist” or an “independent” voice, who is included in and who is excluded from the canon of dissent. All of this, moreover, is in complete harmony with the new hemispheric right, spreading the message that an essential component of the struggle against the Cuban government is the opposition to all forms of progressivism or leftism throughout the world. Gone are the days when Cubans who disagreed with the political and socioeconomic model implemented on the island referred to Canada, Sweden, or Norway as their benchmark: now all that is “communism,” and the only alternative to Cuban socialism in its current phase would be the most stark neoliberal capitalism.
This Miamian hegemony extends to Cubans living elsewhere in the United States, in Spain, in Mexico, and other Latin American countries. Although the latter tend to be immersed in contexts with more pluralistic political debates and take more progressive critical positions toward Havana, they cannot easily escape Florida’s disciplinary effect. Those who do not align themselves with Miami’s agenda will be branded “agents of the regime” or “accomplices of the dictatorship” or—as in “the capital of the Cuban exile” they call those who still claim to be economic migrants and not politically persecuted—pan con lechón, or “steak sandwiches.” The voice of this peripheral diaspora, which either aligns itself or remains silent, is thus usurped.
This explains why only one Cuban voice is heard outside Cuba: that of the Cuban MAGA supporter, who in Spain is pro-Vox, in Mexico supports the PRI, in Argentina is a libertarian, and in every country where he resides acts as a radical activist who bears witness to the “evils of Communism” to which any society is exposed if it votes for the left, itself—internationally, most particularly in the West—far from immune to the distorting effects of anti-Cuban propaganda originated in Miami and the United States at large; it is not uncommon to find “leftists” of all strains, including some in the so-called “Radical Left” (radical about what?) voicing with ridiculously self-assured nonchalance opinions about Cuba’s realities, or the “Cuban regime,” with no basis on any first-hand knowledge of Cuba, its complicated history and its no less complicated present condition. Cubans from Miami are not “the Cubans,” but rather “some Cubans” who have become radicalized and are not only louder than any other political identity in the diaspora, but also enjoy greater media favor and visibility than the rest of the diaspora and the population of the island.
Seen from this perspective, the national debate no longer turns around socialism versus capitalism, or even democracy versus dictatorship: the decisive question is whether this overrepresentation of a single voice will end up—or whether we will allow it to end up—consolidating itself as the political and symbolic representation of the Cuban nation. If so, we will not only have ceded a discursive space, but also legitimized—on behalf of everyone—a policy that, in more than half a century, has done nothing but thrive at the expense of the suffering and punishment of the very nation and people it claims to “defend.”
Featured image: Cuban social media influencer and radio show host Alexander Otaola with Donald Trump in 2020. Photo: Alexander Otaola-Facebook.
Translated from the original in Spanish by Rolando Prats.
