The dictator is gone! Throughout Saturday, we've all been trying to drink from the fire hose of news out of Venezuela, where illegitimate "president" Nicolás Maduro has been ousted, and now faces multiple charges in the United States.
It hasn't taken long for Florida's considerable Venezuelan ex-pat community to weigh in on the ouster of tinpot dictator Maduro. In fact, in Doral, Florida, home to a considerable portion of Florida's estimated 450,000 Venezuelan ex-pats, they are quite literally dancing in the streets.
If you didn’t think it was possible for Florida to become a safer Republican state, you were wrong.
— Jayne Zirkle (@JayneZirkle) January 3, 2026
The 350k Venezuelans in Florida will party in the streets today. pic.twitter.com/SYdsvpnjIr
And, for once, we can't blame these people for flying the flag of their homeland on the streets of an American city.
Revelers chanted “liberty” and draped Venezuelan flags over their shoulders in South Florida on Saturday to celebrate the American military attack that toppled Nicolás Maduro’s government — a stunning outcome they had longed for but left them wondering what comes next in their troubled homeland.
People gathered for a rally in Doral, Florida — the Miami suburb where President Donald Trump has a golf resort and where roughly half the population is of Venezuelan descent — as word spread that Venezuela’s president had been captured and flown out of the country.
Outside the El Arepazo restaurant, a hub of the Venezuelan culture of Doral, one man held a piece of cardboard with “Libertad” scrawled with a black marker. It was a sentiment expressed by other native Venezuelans hoping for a new beginning for their home country as they chanted “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!”
On Saturday, at least, these folks have every reason to be celebrating. But once the party is over and the last shouting has died down, they have to look to the future of Venezuela.
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Here's a snapshot of some of the folks in Doral, who are celebrating today:
In Doral, upper-middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs came to invest in property and businesses when socialist Hugo Chávez won the presidency in the late 1990s. They were followed by political opponents and entrepreneurs who set up small businesses. In recent years, more lower-income Venezuelans have come for work in service industries.
They are doctors, lawyers, beauticians, construction workers and house cleaners. Some are naturalized U.S. citizens or live in the country illegally with U.S.-born children. Others overstay tourist visas, seek asylum, or have some form of temporary status.
In other words, these are the people that Venezuela will desperately need, whatever happens next in that troubled country. They are working people, professional people, productive people, exactly the kind of people a thug-dictator like Maduro would have driven out of Venezuela. They fled to neighboring nations in Central and South America and then to the United States, but now they have a great opportunity. They can return now to, we fervently hope, a renewed Venezuela, a soon-to-be prosperous Venezuela. They had good reason to leave when Venezuela was under the boot of first Hugo Chavez and then Maduro; now, they have good reason to go back.
This is their time.
As my colleague Teri Christoph informs us, President Trump has indicated that the United States, for the time being, will be administering Venezuela. Teri writes:
As for what happens next in Venezuela, the president said the United States is "going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition" of power.
That can't last long. Venezuela's government needs to return to Venezuelan hands as quickly as possible, and there are already a couple of prime candidates to take over and form an interim government. But the new Venezuela will need more than just an interim leader or two. Venezuela needs her people, her productive people, her working people, to build an economy and, in time, a nation that will last. And here's the thing: If Venezuela is to have any future as a free, prosperous, non-socialist nation, prosperity is the key. Chávez and Maduro drove out precisely the people who can produce that prosperity, and favored the cartels instead. That can now be reversed.
This is the moment these folks have been waiting for. It's their time. It's their country. The people remaining there are their people. A generous offer of repatriation from the United States is the right move here. I'm not talking about the offer made to illegal immigrants in the United States to voluntarily repatriate, although that should still be the portion offered to people in the USA illegally from Venezuela. No, we need to make an offer as well to people who are here on visas, or even naturalized citizens who may wish to return. It could be funded by the dictator Maduro's seized assets, assuming, of course, the United States can run them down and seize them, from wherever Maduro stashed them.
These guys always have assets squirreled away somewhere, after all. What may be difficult for a proposed Venezuelan interim government should be no chore for the United States of America, to find Maduro's stash, to return it to where it belongs - to Venezuela.
Viva free Venezuela!
