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The Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar published a strong message on X this Tuesday, supporting the maximum pressure policy of the Trump administration against the Cuban regime, on the same day that Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against 11 elites of the regime and three government organizations.
"The Trump Administration is not playing around. When President Trump and Secretary Rubio say that the Cuban regime's time is up, they mean it," wrote Salazar on her X account.
The representative for the FL-27 district in South Florida, daughter of Cuban exiles, was direct in her assessment: "Each new sanction sends the same message to Havana: the free world already knows who they are, what they have done, and where the money is."
Salazar left no room for ambiguity about the nature of the regime: "No more concessions to a mafia dictatorship that turned Cuba into a prison and exported repression throughout the Americas."
His message concluded with a political reading of the current moment: "The noose is tightening around the dictatorship. And for the first time in a long while, the regime appears to be nervous."
Salazar's statement coincides with the second wave of sanctions announced this Tuesday by Rubio under the Executive Order 14404, signed by President Donald Trump on May 1, 2026.
Among the Cuban officials sanctioned are Roberto Morales Ojeda, Esteban Lazo Hernández, Mayra Arevich Marín, and Raúl Villar Kessell, among others. The designated entities include the Directorate of Intelligence (DGI/G2), the Ministry of the Interior, and the Revolutionary National Police.
Rubio warned that there will be "more appointments in the coming days and weeks," signaling that the pressure has not yet reached its peak.
This second round follows the first one on May 7, when Washington sanctioned GAESA —the military conglomerate that controls between 40% and 70% of Cuba's formal economy— along with its CEO Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera and the mining company Moa Nickel S.A. Rubio then described GAESA as "the heart of Cuba's kleptocratic communist system."
After those sanctions, the shipping companies Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM suspended cargo bookings with Cuba, and the Canadian mining company Sherritt International halted its direct operations on the island. The U.S. set June 5, 2026 as the deadline for foreign companies to sever ties with GAESA under the risk of secondary sanctions.
The regime has responded with defensive rhetoric. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused Washington of wanting to "incite an internal outbreak in Cuba," while Miguel Díaz-Canel stated that the sanctions "strengthen our determination to defend the Homeland."
Since January 2026, the U.S. would have imposed over 240 sanctions against the Cuban regime, a figure that reflects the unprecedented scale of the current pressure.
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