I don’t know about Venezuelans, but there are a lot of Cubans who would vote for a guy running on closing public schools, libraries and hospitals if you showed them a quote where Fidel said anything remotely positive about them.

There are two other things that also ought to have made this less of a surprise. For a lot of older, first-generation immigrants from all over Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, they still really buy into a politician who presents themselves as a strong man that gets stuff done, and will be tough on crime. I heard it from coworkers from Mexico, DR, Peru, Ecuador and plenty of other places. The other part of it is also key in keeping them like this. Spanish-language media in the US presents itself as neutral and professional, but is pretty far-right, and manages to put a more respectable dressing on crazy, conspiratorial shenanigans than Fox do in English. They also know that a large chunk of their audience isn’t going to be able to fact-check English sources when they publish lies.

If I go over and watch the news with my mother-in-law, they’re always very deliberate with pretending to faithfully translate, while tending to take non-Republicans’ statements and changing a key word or two from an indisputably better translation of the English, to a related word with much more negative connotations. I’ve also seen them present a translation as being a full translation of the English audio, while omitting key parts that provide crucial context to the bits they do decide to translate. They also love to keep on airing debunked right-wing conspiracies, weeks or months after they’ve fallen out of the English news cycle and have been accepted as debunked. It’s really annoying to watch.