The Cuban-American Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar responded harshly this Thursday to the statements made by Miguel Díaz-Canel in NBC News, in which the Cuban leader refused to step down from power, bluntly labeling him: "He is not a president. He is a dictator appointed by the Castro regime".
The trigger was the interview that Díaz-Canel gave on Thursday to Kristen Welker, host of Meet the Press, which marked the first appearance of a Cuban leader on American television in decades.
In that interview, Díaz-Canel stated that the idea of revolutionaries abandoning or resigning is not part of our vocabulary and conditioned his departure on the understanding that the Cuban people recognize he is unfit for the position.
Salazar compared the Cuban leader to Nicolás Maduro and warned about his fate: "We've seen this before. Maduro played the same game and ended up in a cell."
The congresswoman for the 27th District of Florida interpreted the interview as a sign of weakness of the regime and as support for Washington's strategy: "This propaganda no longer works and is proof that President Trump's maximum pressure is working. The regime is weak, desperate, and out of breath."
Salazar urged not to give in: "Now is not the time to relent. It is the time to finish this. The Cuban people cry out for FREEDOM!"
In a second message posted hours later, Salazar responded to Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, who had written to her: "He is the president. Accept it."
Salazar accused Benjamin of defending a murderous dictatorship from the comfort of luxury, handing out cookies to innocent children for propaganda videos while real Cubans suffer from hunger, blackouts, imprisonment, and death for demanding freedom.
The congresswoman invoked her representation of hundreds of thousands of exiled families: "I represent hundreds of thousands of families who fled that tyranny and still bear their scars. I have spoken with survivors whose legs were shattered by sharks while crossing the Florida Straits, with families who lost loved ones while fleeing Cuba."
Salazar issued a direct warning to Benjamin: "You are complicit in defending a regime that has destroyed countless lives, and when that dictatorship falls, the world will know who took blood money to whitewash its crimes."
Salazar's statements come at a time of deep crisis in Cuba, where since March 6 there have been at least 156 protests across multiple provinces, the largest since July 11, 2021, with power outages lasting up to 22 hours a day.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio was equally direct about the situation: "They need to put new people in charge because the current leaders don't know how to fix it."
In 2025, a total of 11,268 protests, complaints, and criticisms of the regime had been recorded according to the Cuban Conflict Observatory, a figure that clearly shows how long the Cuban people have been conveying the message that Díaz-Canel claims to be willing to hear.
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