The Argentine president Javier Milei had two tense exchanges with attendees during his speech at the 172nd anniversary of the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange, in front of more than 500 businesspeople, and he made a statement that quickly spread: “If you don’t like it, go to Cuba.”
According to reports from Infobae, the incident occurred while Milei was discussing government spending and the fiscal deficit. An audience member, a lifetime engineer from the institution around 70 years old, interrupted him to question whether the deficit was a problem of the current government rather than previous administrations.
The leader responded immediately from the podium: "No, not now, before. We got out of that, precisely. We made that adjustment that the damn populists planted the bomb for."
In response to the other’s insistence, Milei escalated the exchange with a statement that was met with applause in the room: "I will complete this term, I will be reelected, and I will have four more years. And I have some bad news for you. We are laying the groundwork for a hundred years of liberalism. Therefore, if you don’t like it, go to Cuba."
According to the La Nación dossier, Castellanos was later invited by protocol staff to observe the event from another room.
The incident occurred a day after the Senate postponed the session to discuss the government-sponsored private property inviolability bill. Milei took the opportunity to criticize the opposition legislators: "Those who oppose the strong defense of property rights are clearly the enemies of progress."
The reference to Cuba is not an occasional rhetorical device in Milei's discourse, but a sustained pattern.
The leader has repeatedly described the Cuban regime as a "bloodthirsty, starving, and murderous dictatorship."
In June, he predicted that Cuba will fall on its own and that Trump and Marco Rubio will enter the Island "walking."
In May, during the Milken Institute Conference in Beverly Hills, Milei called for Trump's American dream to arrive soon in Cuba and Venezuela, and he reminded that the Island has been without freedom for 67 years.
At the 79th General Assembly of the UN, in September 2024, he demanded before the UN to exclude Cuba and Venezuela from the Human Rights Council, labeling them as "bloody dictatorships."
Since taking office in December 2023, Milei has not appointed ambassadors to Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua, and expressly excluded Díaz-Canel from his inauguration.
In October 2025, Argentina was one of the only two Latin American countries that voted against Cuba in the annual UN resolution regarding the U.S. embargo, alongside Paraguay.
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