Mailyn Salabarria

Mailyn Salabarria is the Free Cities Foundation’s Senior Advisor on U.S. Development and Strategic Partnerships. A bilingual communications strategist, speaker, and international advisor, she has more than 15 years of experience leading outreach, media, and engagement initiatives across the United States and Latin America.

Born and raised in communist Cuba, Mailyn experienced firsthand the consequences of a system that suppresses individual liberty, free enterprise, and personal responsibility. In pursuit of greater freedom and opportunity, she left Cuba at the age of 27.

She left first for Europe and then for the United States, and has spent the two decades since making the argument from experience rather than from theory. She speaks for the Dissident Project, which sends people who grew up under authoritarian governments into American classrooms, and runs her own consultancy on communications, public relations and international engagement.

At the Foundation her work is the American side of the movement: the funders, partners and institutions in the United States who have heard of charter cities but have never met anyone living in one. Her own case is personal rather than theoretical. She has already made the choice between staying somewhere unfree and leaving everything behind, and thinks fewer people should have to.