Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar urged Cubans in exile to stop sending money to the island to accelerate the regime’s collapse as it teeters on the brink of collapse.
In a social media publication, the lawmaker said “Cuba‘s time of freedom has arrived.” “We have a President and a Secretary of State who are decided to clean our hemisphere of drug dealers and dictators,” she claimed.
However, she went on to say that those in exile “also have a historical responsibility,” which is “stop supplying oxygen to the dictatorship.” “Because every dollar, every trip and every gesture of false normality gives more life to a criminal regime and sentences the Cuban people to another 60 years of misery, repression and slavery,” Salazar claimed.
La hora de la libertad de Cuba ha llegado. Hoy contamos con un Presidente y un Secretario de Estado decididos a limpiar nuestro hemisferio de sátrapas, narcotraficantes y dictadores.
Pero el exilio también tiene una responsabilidad histórica: dejar de darle oxígeno a la…
— María Elvira Salazar 🇺🇸 (@MaElviraSalazar) January 29, 2026
“This is the moment to stop everything: no more tourism, no more remittances, no more mechanisms that continue financing and supporting the dictatorship.”
And while she acknowledged it is “devastating to think about the hunger of a mother” or a “child who needs immediate help,” Cubans in exile face a choice: “short-term suffering or freeing Cuba for good.”
“We can’t keep being hostage of a regime that even from exile forces us to finance our own oppression. In the regime’s final hour, the exile has to choose: freedom,” she concluded.
The plea comes as another report showed that the country as less than a month worth of oil at current levels of demand and domestic production after a recent shipment from Mexico was halted.
Citing data company Kpler, the Financial Times noted that the country has oil to last 15 to 20 days unless deliveries resume. “They have a major crisis on their hands” Jorge Piñon, an oil expert at the University of Texas told the outlet.
The country has only received less than 85,000 barrels this year, according to the FT. All came from a shipment on January 9, Kpler detailed. The figure adds to an estimated 460,000 barrels held in inventories at the beginning of the year.
Cuba relied on oil from Venezuela and Mexico, but shipments from the former stopped following the capture of authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro earlier this month, and the latter is seeing an impact as well.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said this week, however, that her administration intends to continue sending oil to the country on humanitarian grounds. It is unclear if such shipments will help stave off a complete collapse of the country’s energy grid.
Originally published on Latin Times
