By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on December 18, 2025
Republican Congressman Carlos Gimenez in a file photo.
The “three crazy Cubans” are on a rampage. For years, Mario Diaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Carlos Gimenez have presented themselves in the U.S. Congress as a cohesive Cuban-American bloc: hardline against governments they call “totalitarian,” applauding sanctions and publicly defending draconian measures that would be difficult to accept in a truly democratic context.
In recent months, they have shown almost monolithic unity in support of Donald Trump and his agenda, to the point that the nickname circulates among their colleagues as a summary of this group’s role.
In Congress, they are an inflexible and strident trio that helps set the tone in South Florida and pushes for confrontation in the hemisphere.
Within that trio, however, there is one particularly illustrative case: Carlos Giménez’s obsession with Mexico. The most recent evidence came on Tuesday in an interview published by The Floridian, in which Giménez endorsed Donald Trump’s executive order classifying illicitly manufactured fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD).
His praise did not stop at prevention, treatment, harm reduction, or financial networks. He did what he usually does: turn the problem into a war report. He said that the cartels are “probably worse than Al-Qaeda and ISIS” and, when talking about who ‘adulterates’ drugs with lethal doses, he pointed to Mexico: “In my mind, it’s Mexico; the Mexican cartels are the ones who mix it.”
Calling fentanyl a “WMD” shifts the framework from public health and organized crime to the exceptional nature of war. In this logic, Mexico ceases to appear as a complex partner with whom to coordinate actions—with inevitable tensions—and becomes a primary culprit to whom violence, death, and threat are attributed by contiguity. The country is reduced to a functional stereotype, a territory of cartels. This framing does not attempt to understand the full scope of the phenomenon; it seeks political legitimacy to harden positions and point to a guilty “outside.”
The outburst of the “crazy Cuban” is already a pattern in his political discourse. Giménez has been installing Mexico as the permanent villain of his hemispheric script for years. When he talks about drug trafficking, the argument is not limited to pursuing criminal networks, but drifts toward broad political accusations, as if Mexican institutional complexity, transnational corruption, or the demand of the U.S. market itself were secondary details in the face of the usefulness of pointing the finger at a culprit.
The obsession becomes more transparent when Giménez attempts to transfer the siege against Cuba to the heart of the relationship with Mexico. At the end of October, he sent a letter to senior administration officials asking that the renegotiation of the USMCA/T-MEC treaty be used to force Mexico to “end its disturbing relationship” with the Cuban government, suspend oil shipments to Havana, and stop what he calls the ‘trafficking’ of Cuban doctors, presented as “modern slavery.”
In the same package, he accused Mexico of “instrumentalizing” migration to the United States and linked that accusation to the Cuba-Venezuela axis of his agenda. He went so far as to claim that the trade proposal of Claudia Sheinbaum’s government is an attempt to turn the main regional economic agreement into a mechanism for ideological alignment.
By pointing to Mexico as the place where the poison is “mixed,” Giménez turns a discussion of organized crime into a national threat and a geopolitical accusation, useful for sustaining an agenda of pressure. Mexico ceases to be an interlocutor and becomes a ‘channel’ that must be closed: fuel, medical cooperation, diplomatic positions; everything can be relabeled as “complicity” with Cuba.
Giménez’s obsession with Mexico, then, is less a security policy than a policy of expanded encirclement. He does not describe the complexity of a transnational criminal market; he maintains a script in which Cuba is the center and Mexico is the most useful terrain for pressure.
If that logic prevails in Washington, any serious debate on cooperation, public health, and shared responsibilities will be subordinated to the dramatics of this psychopath.
Source: La Jornada, translated by Resumen Latinoamericano – English