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Donald Trump shared an article on his Truth Social account this Friday, a satirical piece from The Babylon Bee titled “Cubans Living in New York Begin Boarding Rafts to Escape Communism Again”, which transports the iconic image of the Cuban rafters to the waters of the East River in Manhattan as a critique of the socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The satire humorously depicts how Cuban Americans in the city would have begun to build makeshift rafts from old furniture to escape the "communism" that, according to the narrative of the conservative site, the government of Mamdani represents.
By sharing the article, Trump turns the joke into a political message directed at his base, reinforcing his equation of the New York mayor's democratic socialism with the communist regimes that forced thousands of Cubans to take to the sea for decades.
One of the fictional characters in the article, "Juan Rodríguez," a successful Cuban immigrant on Wall Street, states: "I don't care where I go, but it can't be here. I escaped from Cuba years ago to find a better life, but now communism is chasing me again."
The same character adds: "It's like that movie Final Destination. You can't escape communism. It keeps coming back. It follows the pattern, hunting down the people it has chosen. We're all going to run out of bread if we don't get out of here."
Another character, "Ricky Ricardo"—clarified as unrelated to the one from the series I Love Lucy—declares: "Of course, I'm not going to Canada, that's for sure. Maybe Greenland? I don’t know. I hope this thing holds up."
The Babylon Bee is an American website known for conservative and evangelical Christian political satire.
The analogy carries a deep historical significance for the Cuban American community. Since the 1960s, with peaks in 1980 during the Mariel exodus and in 1994 during the rafters crisis, tens of thousands of Cubans risked their lives in makeshift boats to escape Fidel Castro's regime.
Mamdani, 34 years old, won the mayoralty of New York on November 4, 2025, and took the oath of office on January 2, 2026 with his hand on the Quran, becoming the first Muslim and South Asian mayor of the city, and the youngest since 1892.
The mayor defines himself unequivocally: "I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist."
His proposals include free buses, universal daycare, rent freezes, and municipally-owned supermarkets, measures that Trump has consistently labeled as "communist" since Mamdani's electoral victory.
The distrust of the Cuban and Venezuelan communities in New York has also been fueled by the refusal of Mamdani to explicitly call Miguel Díaz-Canel and Nicolás Maduro "dictators".
Trump, for his part, has been exploiting this narrative for months: he proclaimed Anti-Communist Week in the United States from November 2 to 8, 2025, threatened to cut about 7.4 billion dollars in federal funds to New York, and declared that Miami would become a refuge for those fleeing communism in the city, directly appealing to the Cuban and Venezuelan communities that have historically supported the Republican Party.
"Throughout generations, Miami has been a refuge for those fleeing communist tyranny," Trump declared on November 6, 2025, days after Mamdani's victory.
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