Otra Noche in Miami: Cold War and Post–Cold War Latin American Political Constellations, 1979–2024

This paper analyzes the Cold War and post-Cold War historical continuities of Miami as a Latin American capital of right-wing politics from after the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s through the fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua in 1979 to the more contemporary transnational politics of Venezuelan, Haitian, Argentine, and Brazilian right-wing forces. Since the turn of the 21st century, the Miami metropolitan area has become a spatial landscape for the politics of Haitian and Venezuelan communities as well as Argentine and Brazilian diasporas. Miami's landscape now includes neighborhoods considered as "Little Haiti", "Doralzuela", "Little Buenos Aires", and "Little Brazil". Venezuelan enclaves and exiled leaders and Haitian emigres in South Florida have engaged in transnational political movements that have included political support for coups and US-backed military interventions. In the last decade, the right-wing Argentine leader Javier Milei and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro have cultivated connections with right-wing religious groups in South Florida that reflect both hemispheric and global right-wing political ideologies. Additionally, this paper engages Latin American critiques of "Miami" as a right-wing city while a different view of Miami in Latin American elites has reshaped spatial landscapes and gated communities in the Latin American metropolitan areas of both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.