This story was updated at 4:15 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2026.
In Doral, home to the U.S.'s largest Venezuelan community, hundreds of bundled-up expats converged on the El Arepazo restaurant before sunrise Saturday morning.
Draped in Venezuelan flags, many began dancing to festive and nostalgic folk songs like "Alma Llanera."
President Donald Trump had just announced that U.S. special forces, amid large-scale U.S. bombing of military targets in Venezuela's capital, Caracas, had captured Dictator-President Nicolás Maduro.
They had flown him out of the country that he and his socialist regime have spent the last dozen years robbing, destroying and terrorizing.
Venezuelan-born Doral entrepreneur Nora Villamarin watched the Arepazo celebration and admitted that she "had lost hope" of ever seeing the restoration of democracy in her patria, which she hasn't been back to in a quarter century.
But now, she said, she was ready to buy a plane ticket home.
"I have three kids — my dream is to take them there," Villamarin told WLRN. "They don't know their origins. Now they will."
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Across the Arepazo parking lot, Doral sales executive, Miguel Reynoso, a native of Maracaibo, Venezuela, who hasn't been back in a decade, echoed Villamarin.
"Two of my three kids have never been to Venezuela," Reynoso said. "So I'm looking forward to take them to see where Dad comes from.
"When I heard the news this morning," he said, "I started crying and yelling and screaming inside my house. I woke everybody up."
Delcy Rodríguez takes the reins
But for all that joy and hope of imminent homecoming, there is a reality that Venezuela's vast diaspora — some 8 million exiles stretching from Doral to Colombia to Spain — may also need to wake up to:
Although Trump insisted in a Mar-a-Lago press conference late Saturday morning that the U.S. is "going to run" Venezuela for the time being — especially, he emphasized, its vast oil reserves, the world's largest — Maduro's removal does not necessarily mean regime removal.
In fact, hours after Maduro and his wife were whisked onto a U.S. warship in the Caribbean off Venezuela's coast, his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, appeared to take the reins at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas — while still projecting loyalty.
“There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro," Rodríguez said, surrounded by top civilian officials and military commanders, in remarks on state TV.
Trump had earlier suggested that Rodríguez had been sworn in as the new president — and that she and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had struck a deal letting her run Venezuela's government, at least during a transition until new elections can be held, while the U.S. runs the oil fields.
But Saturday afternoon, Rodríguez appeared to refute that plan, defiantly calling Maduro's capture a "kidnapping" and declaring the country would not become a "colony" of the U.S.
"There's no dancing in the streets here. Caracas is dead quiet. And its message to expats may be: I wouldn't uncork the champagne just yet — or buy that plane ticket."Phil Gunson, senior Venezuela analyst.
Meanwhile, her defense minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino, insisted Venezuela's military had not abandoned the dictatorship, in spite of the crippling damage it likely suffered during Saturday morning's U.S. bombing strikes.
As a result, while the diaspora cheered in Doral, Venezuelans stayed silently at home in Caracas.
"There's no dancing in the streets here," Phil Gunson, senior Venezuela analyst for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, told WLRN from Caracas.
"Caracas is dead quiet. And its message to expats may be: I wouldn't uncork the champagne just yet — or buy that plane ticket."
Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado told her supporters in Venezuela to await instructions about mobilizing for a transition to power — even though at Mar-a-Lago, Trump appeared to exclude her from the process and, stunningly, asserted she does not have "the support or the respect within" Venezuela to lead a new administration there.
But Gunson emphasized that regime change has not yet happened — and may not for quite a while "if Rodríguez is able to hold the edifice together" the way Maduro had done since taking office in 2013, after the death of the regime's founder, Hugo Chávez, who came to power in 1999.
Gunson acknowledged Rodríguez's success is hardly assured, especially since her regime faction has so often been at odds with that of Interior Minister and former military honcho Diosdado Cabello.
He is widely considered Venezuela's more powerful — and sinister — leader.
Adds one Venezuela political analyst in Caracas, who asked not to be identified, "Delcy can also be her own enemy: she's quite mercurial and can fly off the handle. We'll see how well she plays this."
Gunson said it appears the Trump administration decided its four-month-long effort to pressure Maduro to leave power — by amassing military assets in the Caribbean — didn't work.
It therefore had to take the "riskier" move of going in and getting him by force in the dark wee hours of Saturday.
Maduro is under indictment for drug-trafficking in the U.S., where there was a $50 million bounty on his head.
He and security forces have also been accused by the U.N. of crimes against humanity — especially in 2024, during a brutal regime crackdown after Maduro stole a presidential election he had clearly lost to Venezuela's democratic opposition candidate, Edmundo González. (He had filled in for Machado when Maduro barred her from running.)
'More to this story than we know'
The question, Gunson noted, is whether regime change "will now be quietly forgotten" by Trump as he enjoys his Maduro victory — or if he is now counting on Maduro's ouster to set off "a destructive fracturing" inside the regime, especially the military, that will bring about its demise — and bring the opposition to power.
Other analysts concurred that Trump's "we're going to run the country now" declaration has more to do with U.S. control of Venezuelan sectors like oil.
"I think he's talking about influence over the oil sector and other important areas," said Brian Fonseca, director of the Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University and an expert on Venezuela's military.
"Taking Maduro out may actually prove to be the easiest step in this process."Brian Fonseca, Venezuela military expert
While special ops could nab Maduro, Fonseca pointed out that definitively bringing down the Venezuelan regime, including its military, would have likely taken a full-blown U.S. invasion. That in turn would mean three to four times the 15,000 or so soldiers and sailors Trump has positioned in the Caribbean since last summer.
A nation-building invasion of that kind would be unpopular with Trump's MAGA voter base.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump asserted the U.S. military is ready to go in with a "second and much bigger wave" of attack, with "boots on the ground," if Venezuela's remaining leadership doesn't cooperate with the U.S. moving forward. But he said it "probably won't be necessary."
Many military experts are also asking why those U.S. special forces didn't face more Venezuelan military and security resistance to Maduro's capture than expected, including more surface-to-air missile fire.
Did the regime hierarchy possibly decide to step aside and sacrifice Maduro as a means of survival?
"It was certainly impressive how U.S. helicopters conducted this operation, flying so low right into the capital," Fonseca told WLRN. "But there may be more to this story in that regard than we really know yet."
Either way, Fonseca added that what may lie ahead is a protracted evolution of power from the dictatorship to the opposition.
"Venezuela's regime military institution doesn't trust the opposition" to treat it leniently if someone like Machado takes over Miraflores, Fonseca said.
As a result, foreshadowing Trump's remarks at Mar-a-Lago, Fonseca suggested the U.S. would push for "some sort of power-sharing arrangement between the regime elite and the opposition, where you just hand the keys to Rodríguez for a while, then call a democratic election down the road and give Machado and the opposition time to prepare for the transfer of power."
"Taking Maduro out may actually prove to be the easiest step in this process," he added.
Nonetheless, Venezuelan expats at El Arepazo in Doral on Saturday morning were exultantly optimistic.
"I felt a sense of joy and justice when I heard Maduro was captured," said Daniel Victoria, a Kendall psychologist who left Venezuelan two decades ago in the fact of what he called regime persecution.
"My country sees freedom now. Many people have died under this dictatorship, millions of families have been destroyed, and this is the first step to national reunion.
"Good times are coming."
And that belief, for now, has the diaspora dancing.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
