[Venezuelans in Dural, Florida and around the world are visiting their homeland by viewing a 360 degree high-definition video in virtual reality, as reported in this story from WLRN Public Media. Note especially the first-person reporting at the end by the author herself. The original story includes an audio version, a second image, a nine-image photo gallery from Instagram, and the 10:24 minute video from YouTube. (Personal note: I wish I could discuss this story and project with my former student, colleague and friend Gisela Gil-Egui and her husband Jose Labrador.) –Matthew]

[Image: Friends at the “Teleport to Venezuela” event in Doral’s Tripping Animals bar and brewery on March 1, 2025. Credit: Natalie La Roche Pietri]

A virtual reality experience takes Venezuelans in South Florida to their homeland

By Natalie La Roche Pietri, WLRN education reporter
March 25, 2025

On a recent weekend afternoon, Candida Gabriele joined a group of friends at a brewery in Doral to embark on a trip — a virtual one — to their native Venezuela.

For Gabriele, who left her homeland 17 years ago, the virtual experience of seeing her country again was an emotional rollercoaster. She last visited more than 10 years ago.

“I thought it was going to be a lot of tourism and landscape,” Gabriele said in Spanish. “It was people and life and the reality of our country. That’s what I liked.”

“It was beautiful and it made me feel really good — and miss it,” she added, wiping away tears.

The journey Gabriele and others, mostly Venezuelans, experienced through virtual reality technology was created by Noa Iimura. He recorded the South American country’s landscape, cities and people and turned it into a 35-minute production.

Iimura, who is 29 and grew up in Japan and the United States, said his goal was to test his limits and learn about the world and himself. He traveled alone to Venezuela and other countries in Central and South America.

He launched a tour last year with the “Teleport to Venezuela” virtual reality experience, showcasing his project across 40 cities — including New York, Houston and Seattle. The tour has drawn more than 10,000 people.

The exhibit will be shown again in Doral from April 4-7. It is also making stops in Spain and other U.S. cities.

Bringing Venezuela abroad

Iimura told WLRN that he traveled to Venezuela after visiting Colombia en route to Brazil.

“People told me not to go there,” Iimura said, noting personal safety concerns. “It was like the one country that nobody had actually been to before, but everyone told you not to go, especially people that were traveling. Fellow backpackers were always like, ‘Oh, Venezuela is not a country we go to.’”

His trip took place at a time when the U.S. State Department was publicly advising against traveling to Venezuela “due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure.”

“As someone that likes to document different realities and enjoys seeing it with my own eyes,” Iimura said, “it just didn’t seem very fair to just let what I hear become what I think.”

He had his guard up for the first two weeks, wary of potential threats around him. But on a beach in Patanemo in the state of Carabobo, that fear vanished.

“It was really the kids that I saw in Patanemo who were running around on the beach, jumping in the water, doing somersaults” that changed his perspective, Iimura said. “It took me until then to really feel like, ‘Okay. Let me just look at this country the way it is, instead of letting what I hear still dictate my mentality.’”

What was originally supposed to be a month-long trip in 2022 turned into six months.

“There was always something that spiked my curiosity, something that I always wanted to pursue, something that I wanted to get to know more. And it was really the people that kind of really welcomed me in and allowed me to really stay longer,” Iimura said.

He documented the trip with a 360 camera and uploaded the videos to Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Iimura, who studied filmmaking in college, narrated the videos with his own observations.

Venezuelans, he said,loved the videos, and messaged him with invitations to their cities and offered lodging.

Ramón Ortega was one of the people who messaged Iimura on Instagram and invited him to the Magallanes vs. Leones baseball game, a must-see in Valencia. That game, filmed on the 360 camera, is in the virtual reality experience and his YouTube channel. By tapping and swiping on the screen, viewers can see the entire arena environment.

In Doral, experience ‘hits close to the heart’

Doral is home to one of the largest Venezuelan-American communities in the country, so it was a logical locale to feature the virtual experience.

“We are all Venezuelans. So of course we feel highly identified with [Iimura’s] project,” said Iker Elorriaga, one of the four Venezuelan owners of Tripping Animals brewery. “It hits close to the heart, everything that [Iimura’s] been doing.”

With tostones on the menu, the Venezuelan Grammy-winning band Rawayana playing on the speakers and Venezuelan slang being thrown around left and right, the Venezuelan identity in Tripping Animals is palpable.

The exhibit also inspired a mural in Wynwood.

Artist Alex Siniscalchi, who moved from Venezuela to Washington state in 2016 to escape political persecution, painted the mural. It features a young boy wearing a virtual reality headset, macaws and an Indigenous woman with the country’s flag colors painted on her cheek.

“We wanted to show the sense of [Iimura’s] documentary,” Siniscalchi said. “So we painted the natural beauty with the indigenous people, with colors of Venezuela and where we come from.”

Venezuelans’ hardships — at home and in the U.S.

Iimura said he also learned of the hard reality many Venezuelans in the country face: economic depression, political turmoil and social unrest that has led nearly 8 million people to flee.

“I realized that virtual reality may be the closest format that people can feel like they’re back home, even for just a moment,” Iimura said. “So then the project just kind of took a turn of its own.”

The project especially resonated for Venezuelans here in the U.S. in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to end temporary visa programs that threaten to force hundreds of thousands back to their country.

Sonia Lazzereschi, whose family moved from Venezuela to the U.S. more than two decades ago, teaches fifth grade in Doral and sees fear in her students and their parents. Many have cried with her.

“ I have a lot of parents who have cried with me because they don’t know what their destiny is going to be. A lot of them have asylum, or TPS [Temporary Protected Status], and there’s a lot of doubt,” Lazzereschi said in Spanish. “It’s hard for the little kids to feel that.”

Jose Francisco Castellanos attended the exhibit with family and his partner. He was born in Venezuela and moved to Doral when he was just a year old. He’s now 28 now, and has returned to Venezuela twice.

“ I think the experience of Venezuela is unique to people who leave early, like myself,” said Castellanos, adding that he had to form his Venezuelan identity in the U.S.

After taking off the headset, “ the first thing I wanted to do was buy a ticket and go,” Castellanos said.

To him, the virtual reality trip offers people like him the “opportunity to reconnect and to feel at home in our home away from home. That, to me, is magical.”

It’s hard to reconcile the layered emotional turmoil Venezuelans face. On one hand, many are terrified of being sent back against their will after having created a life abroad. On the other hand, many who left feel they can never go back. This virtual reality experience is the closest many have been to seeing home in a long time.

Precious childhood memories

As someone born in Venezuela and raised in South Florida, the experience brought to the surface the nostalgia for my homeland I usually keep deeply buried.

I’ve only been back once since moving to the U.S. when I was a little girl.

With the headset on, the congested Caracas highway was just as I remember it when visiting my grandparents. I’ve never been to Canaima National Park, but the hovering fog and the sheer force of the Salto Angel waterfall felt real.

I was teary eyed when I took the headset off as I recalled precious memories from my childhood, like trips with my grandparents, and grieved moments I wish I could have been there for, like attending their funerals.

The virtual experience, in a sense, restored my hope that one day I’ll see my first home again.

Like others who took the virtual journey, I was especially moved by the last clip. It showed a man in Petare with one of the country’s most popular beer brands, Polar, in his hand as he sang Luis Silva’s song, Venezuela.

“I carry your light and aroma on my skin… I carry the foam of the sea in my blood and your horizon in my eyes,” the man sang.