Rep. Elvira Salazar's First Bill Targets Communist Castro Regime

After joining Florida Republican lawmakers in voting against the impeachment of President Donald Trump (R), Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R) announced this week that she was proud to introduce her very first bill as a member of the House. The bill, named the FORCE Act, targets the Castro regime and was co-sponsored by a number of Florida lawmakers like Reps. Mario Diaz Balart (R), Carlos Gimenez (R), Nicole Malliotakis (R), Alex Mooney (R), Neal Dunn (R), Michael Waltz (R), Stephanie Bice (R) and Kat Cammack (R).

With the "Fighting Oppression until the Reign of Castro Ends Act," Rep. Elvira Salazar notes that “the State Department recently redesignated the Castro regime in Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism for granting safe harbor to terrorist fugitives and engaging in international terrorism.”

Knowing this, the freshman lawmaker argues that “to ensure compliance and stop Cuba from sponsoring terrorism, this bill prevents the brutal Castro dictatorship from being removed from the State Sponsor of Terrorism List until they meet the requirements of Section 205 of the LIBERTAD Act.

The section entails that Cuba “release all its political prisoners and allow for investigations of Cuban prisons by appropriate international human rights organizations,” “transition away from the Castro regime to a system that guarantees the rights of the Cuban people to express themselves freely” and to “commit to holding free and fair elections” in order to be removed from the State Sponsor of Terrorism List.

Commenting on the need for this bill, Elvira Salazar expressed that “as the daughter of Cuban refugees who fled the brutal dictatorship that continues to jail, starve, murder, and systematically oppress the people of Cuba,” her bill “holds the Castro regime accountable for harboring fugitives of the American justice system, propping up the Maduro and Ortega regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua respectively, and engaging in violent acts of terrorism across our hemisphere.”