THEY EXPECTED euphoria. Venezuelan-born residents of Doral, a city just north of Miami, had been waiting for the fall of Nicolás Maduro since Donald Trump foreshadowed American strikes this summer. Perusing the aisles of a petrol-station’s market stocked with masa flour and tinned sardines in December, María, who fled Caracas with her husband after government officials sent him death threats, imagined what regime change might mean. First, she would spend a “whole day without sleep” celebrating. Then she would return to the white-sand beaches she grew up on.


