María Elvira Salazar: "A dictatorship that needs mobs to survive is a dictatorship in its final phase."

The Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar described the Cuban regime as a dictatorship in its final phase, referring to the repudiation acts organized against the U.S. mission chief in Havana, Mike Hammer, during his visit to the city of Camagüey.

In the message posted on her X account, the Congresswoman from Florida wrote: A dictatorship that needs mobs to survive is a dictatorship in its final phase. The United States will not allow the normalization of state terror against an American diplomat. They are playing with fire. With that statement, Salazar summarized what she sees as the exhaustion of the Cuban system and the failure of its intimidation tactics against diplomats and citizens, a message regarding the acts of repudiation that not only denounces the violence organized by the regime but also reinforces her view that power in Havana is going through a terminal phase, sustained by repression and propaganda.

The legislator expressed in the same message her full solidarity with the American diplomat Mike Hammer and condemned the aggression as a cowardly ambush ordered by the Cuban dictatorship. In her opinion, the so-called acts of repudiation are political attacks orchestrated by the repressive apparatus of the regime and reflect the level of deterioration of power in Havana, which —she said— can no longer sustain itself without fear or the mobs it mobilizes to instill it.

The episode referred to by Salazar occurred on Saturday at the Santa María Hotel, located in the Plaza del Gallo of Camagüey, where Mike Hammer was confronted by a crowd mobilized by local authorities. Videos of the incident, shared by activists and independent journalists, show participants shouting slogans such as “imperialist,” “Trump's puppet,” and “out of Camagüey.”

During his tour of the country, the U.S. diplomat had been harassed the day before in the city of Trinidad, after meeting with the priest and activist José Conrado Rodríguez. Hammer then stated that those who insulted him “do not represent the Cuban people” and reiterated that his mission aimed to meet “the ordinary Cubans and listen to their aspirations for a better Cuba.”

Salazar's post is part of a series of messages in which he has intensified his criticism of the Cuban regime. Days earlier, he stated that Miguel Díaz-Canel, Raúl Castro, and Bruno Rodríguez “deserve neither attention nor legitimacy”, and called on the Cuban exile community to take on a historic responsibility in the fight for the Island's freedom.

His message reaffirms an uncompromising political stance: to denounce Castroism, support those who confront it, and remind us that —in his words— tyrants only survive as long as fear allows.