Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL), the daughter of Cuban exiles and one of Congress’s most persistent advocates for a hardline Cuba policy, endorsed President Trump’s sweeping new executive order on Cuba on May 1, 2026, framing it as a long-overdue reckoning with what she called a growing national security threat operating ninety miles from American shores. “For years, I have been sounding the alarm: the Cuban regime is a growing national security threat to the United States,” Salazar said. “Havana has become a hub for the Iranian regime and a launchpad for terrorist networks like Hezbollah and Hamas. The era of appeasement is over — we will not allow a regime aligned with our enemies to operate 90 miles from our shores.”
Salazar’s statement came hours after Trump signed the executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on Those Responsible for Repression in Cuba and for Threats to United States National Security and Foreign Policy.” The order dramatically expands the U.S. sanctions architecture against Cuba — deploying the full asset-blocking authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and, for the first time, threatening foreign banks worldwide with loss of access to U.S. markets if they continue to facilitate transactions with sanctioned Cuban entities.
Cuba’s Alleged Ties to Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas
The national security case at the center of both Salazar’s statement and the executive order itself rests on Cuba’s alleged alignment with state sponsors of terrorism and designated terrorist organizations. The White House Fact Sheet accompanying the order states that “Cuba maintains close ties to other major state sponsors of terrorism, including the Government of Iran, and provides safe haven for transnational terrorist groups, including Hezbollah.” The January 2026 executive order that declared Cuba a national emergency went further, stating that the Cuban regime “aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors,” including Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
The administration has also cited Cuba’s hosting of foreign intelligence infrastructure as a direct threat to U.S. homeland security. According to Executive Order 14380, signed January 29, 2026, “Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information of the United States,” and “continues to build deep intelligence and defense cooperation with the PRC.” White House officials cited by Reuters stated the order contained an implicit warning about those ties, with one official noting that “Cuba provides a permissive environment for hostile foreign intelligence, military, and terrorist operations less than 100 miles from the American homeland.”
These claims about Cuba’s ties to Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas have been part of the U.S. government’s formal case against Havana for years. At his January 2025 Senate nomination hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio listed Cuba’s “ties to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran” among the factors justifying Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, as documented by the Congressional Research Service. Cuba has denied the characterizations and rejected the sanctions as illegal collective punishment.
Who Is María Elvira Salazar?
Salazar’s reaction to the order carries particular biographical weight. Born in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood to Cuban exile parents who arrived in the United States with five dollars, she built a three-decade career as a Spanish-language broadcast journalist before entering Congress. As detailed on her official House biography, she is a five-time Emmy Award-winning journalist who covered Cuba, Venezuela, and other authoritarian regimes in Latin America — and is the only U.S. Spanish-language journalist to have interviewed Fidel Castro one-on-one. She has represented Florida’s 27th Congressional District since 2021 and currently chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.
Her statement that she has been “sounding the alarm” on Cuba as a national security threat for years is consistent with her legislative record. According to reporting, Salazar was among the Cuban-American lawmakers who in February 2026 explicitly called on the Trump administration to freeze Cuban regime assets abroad as part of a maximum pressure strategy — a demand the May 1 executive order directly answers. She has consistently framed the Cuba issue not merely as a human rights concern but as a geopolitical one, tied directly to Iran, Russia, China, and terrorist organizations operating in the Western Hemisphere.
The Executive Order: Key Provisions
The May 1 executive order builds on the national emergency declared by Executive Order 14380 on January 29, 2026. It authorizes the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury to block all U.S.-held assets belonging to any foreign person operating in Cuba’s energy, defense, metals and mining, financial services, or security sectors. It also extends sanctions to those responsible for serious human rights abuses, corrupt Cuban officials, and — in an unusually expansive provision — adult family members of any designated individual. The order states explicitly that no prior notice need be given to those targeted, to prevent the instantaneous movement of assets.
The most significant new element is the authorization of secondary sanctions against foreign financial institutions. Under Section 4, any foreign bank that conducts or facilitates significant transactions with sanctioned Cuban entities risks losing its U.S. correspondent accounts — the dollar-clearing relationships that are essential for international banking. Former Treasury sanctions investigator Jeremy Paner, now a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, described the provision to Reuters as “the most significant one for non-American companies since the U.S. embargo against Cuba began decades ago,” adding that banks which had carefully kept their Cuba operations segregated from U.S. jurisdiction “are no longer protected.”
Cuba’s Response and Economic Context
The Cuban government rejected the order in sharp terms. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called the measures “unilateral coercive measures” that violate the United Nations Charter and constitute collective punishment against the Cuban people. President Miguel Díaz-Canel described the sanctions as reinforcing what he called a “brutal, genocidal blockade.” Both statements were issued as Cuba held its annual May Day march in Havana — which this year passed directly in front of the U.S. Embassy and was led by Díaz-Canel and a rare public appearance by former President Raúl Castro, now 94, who had not been seen publicly in five months.
The order arrives as Cuba faces one of the most severe economic crises in its modern history. The Economist Intelligence Unit projects a 7.2% GDP contraction for Cuba in 2026, which would represent a cumulative economic decline of approximately 23% since 2019. The country has experienced repeated nationwide electrical grid collapses, with power outages stretching up to 25 hours daily in more than 55% of its territory, following the effective cutoff of Cuban oil imports after the U.S. military removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 — ending Venezuela’s role as Cuba’s primary oil supplier. The Trump administration has imposed over 240 sanctions on Cuba and intercepted at least seven oil tankers bound for the island since January 2025, according to White House officials.
A Broader Cuban-American Coalition in Congress
Salazar was not alone among Cuban-American lawmakers in praising the executive order. Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL) posted on social media with the hashtag #SOSCuba that the new sanctions were “necessary to target its security apparatus — the machine that jails political prisoners and oppresses its people,” warning the regime that “if it continues to operate in bad faith, much harsher consequences will follow.” The Cuban-American bloc in Congress — which also includes Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL) and Florida Senators Marco Rubio and Ashley Moody — has been a consistent force pushing the executive branch toward maximum pressure on Havana and has repeatedly cited the Cuba-Iran-Hezbollah nexus as justification for treating the issue as a national security matter rather than merely a bilateral diplomatic dispute.
The framing of Cuba as a node in a broader network of U.S. adversaries — linking Havana directly to Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, Hezbollah, and Hamas — has become the central organizing argument for the Trump administration’s Cuba policy. For Salazar, whose family history is inseparable from the story of Cuban exile and whose journalism career was built in large part on confronting the Castro regime, the May 1 executive order represents not just a policy position but a vindication of warnings she has been issuing, in her own words, for years. Whether the expanded sanctions succeed in forcing meaningful change in Havana — or whether, as critics warn, they deepen the humanitarian crisis on the island without dislodging the government — will be determined in the months ahead as Congress, the Treasury Department, and foreign financial institutions assess what the new order actually means in practice.