Biden wants to re-thaw relations with Cuba. He'll have to navigate Florida politics.

By
Anthony Faiola and
Karen DeYoung
November 25, 2020 at 3:17 p.m. CST

MIAMI — Stirred by breathless warnings of a socialist menace, Cuban Americans turned out for President Trump in massive numbers. Now those voters are presenting a new challenge for President-elect Joe Biden: How to reembrace the historic Obama-era opening with communist Cuba without ceding Florida to the Republicans in 2024.

On few countries is U.S. foreign policy driven more by domestic politics than Cuba and, to a lesser degree, Venezuela. Exiles and Americans of Cuban and Venezuelan descent who harbor deep antipathy for the governments in those leftist police states helped Trump win this key swing state this month. Trump’s net gains in South Florida’s Cuban community alone, experts say, accounted for as much as a third of the 372,000 votes that cost Biden the state.

But Biden is gambling that a focus on the restoration of flights and remittance privileges removed under Trump — which Miami Cubans have griped about over steaming cups of cafecito — will allow his administration to re-engage Havana without enraging a pivotal electorate. Ultimately, the failure of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaigns against leftist authoritarians in Havana and Caracas to provoke significant change could help Biden swing the pendulum back toward detente.

On Venezuela, Biden has signaled no change in the sanctions on indictments of top officials, but he has said he plans to focus more on the humanitarian plight of a people suffering under a harsh autocracy. At least in the short term, President Nicolás Maduro is unlikely to enjoy a major break in his international isolation.

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/biden-cuba-venezuela-maduro/2020/11/25/5762e044-2abe-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html

(People who've watched the Post over time are aware the Post is virulently hostile toward ALL leftist-led Latin American countries. Don't know what the story is on that. Very peculiar.)