The son of Cuban immigrants and the pride of Miami’s anti-Castro exile community, Sen. Marco Rubio has long been a critic of Venezuela, which he called “the new Cuba” in a memorable speech on the Senate floor in 2014. | Brynn Anderson/AP Photo foreign policy Rubio Twitter-shames chef ‘Salt Bae’ for feeding brutal dictator

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio railed against the celebrity chef known as ‘Salt Bae’ on Monday and Tuesday for posting social media videos of him obsequiously feeding lamb to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, whose nation is reeling from a food-shortage crisis and failed-state economy.

“I don’t know who this weirdo #Saltbae is, but the guy he is so proud to host is not the President of #Venezuela. He is actually the overweight dictator of a nation where 30% of the people eat only once a day & infants are suffering from malnutrition,” Rubio wrote on Twitter last night at 10:22 p.m.

I don’t know who this weirdo #Saltbae is, but the guy he is so proud to host is not the President of #Venezuela. He is actually the overweight dictator of a nation where 30% of the people eat only once a day & infants are suffering from malnutrition. https://t.co/sSNPK9cAAx — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 18, 2018


Rubio didn’t stop there.

About 15 minutes later, he pointed out that “this guy @nusr_ett who admires dictator @NicolasMaduro so much actually owns a steakhouse in, of all places, #Miami” — which is home to one of the nation’s largest communities of Venezuelan exiles — and the Republican senator included the phone number and address of the Nusr-Et restaurant on Brickell Avenue.

This guy @nusr_ett who admires dictator @NicolasMaduro so much actually owns a steakhouse in, of all places, #Miami. It’s called NUSR-ET STEAKHOUSE MIAMI located at 999 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

The phone number is 1 305 415 9990 in case anyone wanted to call. https://t.co/7CDkgHVZWh — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 18, 2018

The chef — whose real name is Nusret Gökçe — moments later deleted the videos of him, clad in black and wearing sunglasses at night, gyrating his hips as he sliced lamb chops for the paunchy cigar-puffing dictator at one of his restaurants in the chef’s native Turkey.

Gökçe is famous as a social media phenomenon who was the basis of a meme for the dramatic way he salts meat, giving him the nickname “Salt Bae.”

In one of the now-deleted videos, Maduro is presented with a T-shirt of Salt Bae performing his signature salting technique that the dictator wore like a bib. In another now-deleted video, Gökçe showed himself taking some of Maduro’s cigars. And, in a third, Gökçe and Maduro embrace as the leader leaves the restaurant.

“I’ll see you soon in Caracas,” Maduro told Gökçe.

But if the chef travels to Caracas, meat will be hard to find.

Under the socialist dictator, Venezuela’s economic crisis — which has led to nearly 1 million percent inflation and 2.3 million evacuees in the largest mass-migration in the western hemisphere’s history — has left hundreds of thousands hungry, many have lost so much weight that they joke they’re on the “Maduro diet.” Dumpster diving for food has become shockingly common in what used to be South America’s richest country as a result of the world’s largest oil reserves.

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Many Venezuelans eat only once daily now, and almost 30 percent said they eat “nothing or close to nothing,” according to Meganalisis poll cited by The Miami Herald, which downloaded the videos before they were deleted. Rubio, who has sometimes feuded with the hometown paper, praised its story on Monday morning.

Because he tweeted the business’s address and phone number, Rubio drew some criticism for “doxing,” which generally means the publishing of private information about a person for malicious reasons. Rubio’s office declined to comment but said it appreciated people were talking about the horrors of the Maduro regime.

The son of Cuban immigrants and the pride of Miami’s anti-Castro exile community, Rubio has long been a critic of Venezuela, which he called “the new Cuba” in a memorable speech on the Senate floor in 2014. Rubio successfully pushed for tough sanctions against the South American nation, helped pack President Trump’s foreign policy team with anti-Castro hardliners from Miami and has even been the subject of an alleged assassination plot by a Venezuelan politician.

Meanwhile, the country has only declined in economic health as government repression increased during the Maduro regime.

More than half of the United States’ estimated Venezuelan population of 366,000 live in Florida, according to the most recent census figures, and many are clustered in the South Florida cities of Doral and Weston, which have been respectively nicknamed Doralzuela and Westonzuela by locals.

The Venezuelan population in the United States doubled over the past decade and the number seeking political asylum in the U.S. doubled to 28,000 — five times more than the number in 2015.

As their numbers grow, Venezuelan exiles and Venezuelan Americans have become an increasingly pursued demographic for politicians in Florida. Exact figures are hard to come by, but political consultants estimate there could be anywhere from 30,000 to almost 80,000 voters in Florida of Venezuelan descent.

Florida Republicans, traditionally allied with Castro-hating Cuban exiles, have tried to make inroads in the community by branding Florida Democrats as “socialist,” a term that Democrats say is as inflammatory as it is inaccurate. For Democrats, the pushback against the GOP is equally inflammatory: President Trump, they say, is like Maduro.

Monday’s Maduro moment for Gökçe marked the second time he became the subject of criticism for his light touch regarding dictators. Last year, he was pressured to remove an Instagram picture of himself posing, cigar in hand, admiringly next to an image of a cigar-smoking Fidel Castro.

“They said you started a revolution, too,” Gökçe wrote at the time.

