On 11 February 2026 Florida Representatives Carlos Giménez (FL-26), Mario Díaz-Balart (FL-25) and María Elvira Salazar (FL-27) sent a joint letter to OFAC and the Bureau of Industry and Security demanding a comprehensive review and revocation of every active licence authorising US business with Cuban state-controlled entities1. The letter invokes the 1996 LIBERTAD Act and Cuba's State Sponsor of Terrorism designation.
The three signatories are not random. FL-25, FL-26 and FL-27 cover the majority of the Cuban-American diaspora in south Florida, and their offices function as the permanent congressional constituency for hardline Cuba policy. The demand is tactical: general licences and specific licences issued under the Cuban Assets Control Regulations are the legal instruments that carve exceptions into an otherwise comprehensive embargo, and revoking them removes the daylight through which ordinary US-Cuba commerce passes.
The effect is already partly visible in Treasury practice. The 25 March Venezuela licence permitting private-sector Cuban buyers only, while keeping GAESA and the Cuban state blocked, maps closely to the letter's logic of private-over-state differentiation. Lowdown has not found a public Treasury written response to the 11 February letter through 15 April, but absence is not the same as inaction: licence revocations under OFAC practice do not require correspondence announcements. Whether a broader revocation programme materialises, particularly against the telecommunications and travel authorisations that remain in place, is the open policy question. Silence past a further 30 days would itself be a signal about the weight Treasury is giving to the delegation's pressure.
