VP Pence goes after Cuba

This year, citizens across the wider region will vote to choose their leaders and chart their future, from Colombia to Brazil to the United States and other nations.

Yet even as we celebrate this exercise in freedom, the dark cloud of tyranny still hangs heavy over too many of our neighbors in this hemisphere.

In Cuba, the longest-surviving dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere still clings to power.  For nearly 60 years, the Castro family systematically sapped the wealth of a great nation and of the Cuban people.

While the Castro name is now fading, the oppression and police state they imposed is as powerful as ever. 

Today, the United States once again stands with the Cuban people in their stand for freedom. No longer will our dollars fund Cuba’s military, security, and intelligence services – the core of that regime.

And in this administration, we will stand and we will always say, “Que Viva Cuba Libre.”

But Cuba’s leaders have never been content to stifle just their own people’s freedom.

For generations, that communist regime has sought to export its failed ideology across the wider region.

And today, the seeds of Cuban tyranny are bearing fruit in Nicaragua and Venezuela.