Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned five Cuban companies, despite Havana’s attempts to liberalize.
Rubio leaned into the stick side of the carrot-and-stick approach to Cuba on Tuesday, dashing hopes from the Cuban government that a new move to modernize could spare it from further crushing sanctions. Three of the five companies were linked to the Grupo de Administracion Empresarial, a military-run conglomerate that controls much of Cuba’s economy. The State Department also sanctioned the wife of Alejandro Castro Espin, a member of the Castro extended family.
GAESA continues to operate as the financial muscle behind the Cuban regime’s repressive security apparatus. “Two of the entities designated today are GAESA-linked financial institutions associated with moving money on the regime’s behalf, and one is a GAESA-linked logistics company that executes the regime’s bidding across the island,” Rubio said in a statement.
Another two of the sanctioned entities are behind the exploitation of the island’s natural resources.
“These entities and actors fund, facilitate, or benefit from the regime’s malign activities, both in Cuba and across our hemisphere,” Rubio said.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Cuban Embassy for comment.
Rubio backed up his new sanctions with a post on X, arguing that rather than improving, the situation was actually “devolving” in Cuba, as the “island’s corrupt, brutal and anti-American Communist regime continues to prioritize its own total control over the freedom, opportunity and basic wellbeing of the Cuban people.”
“The Cuban military-controlled conglomerate GAESA has persistently served as the main vector for regime elites to steal the island’s few resources, diverting them for repression, anti-American subversion and spying instead of schools, power plants, and basic necessities for the Cuban people,” he said. “Today, I designated additional GAESA network entities associated with moving both its money and its physical assets, as well as entities responsible for exploiting Cuba’s mineral and metal reserves for ill-gotten profit.”
Rubio reminded outside companies that they risked sanctions of their own if they did business with the designated entities, a threat that has already led to a renewed business exodus from the island in recent months.
Cuba passed a series of laws last week, undertaking one of its most sweeping pushes to economically liberalize.
“We need to unleash production, to have more output and less restriction,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a nationally televised address on June 18.
He said the new laws were only passed after months of intensive analysis and debate.
“This public debate broadened, strengthened, and reinforced the projections contained in the initial document,” Diaz-Canel said. “And respecting the opinion of our people, in recent months we have worked intensively with experts, consulting criteria, including international criteria, using Artificial Intelligence platforms.”
Though all the details weren’t immediately clear, he outlined several major reforms, such as giving state enterprises import and export powers and the ability to retain some foreign currency.
“To whoever wants to build with Cuba without seeking to impose anything upon it, we say with our hand on our heart: Here is your home, and here is the open door,” the Cuban president said. “Because, for this homeland at this hour, not a single good Cuban is expendable.”
Despite the reforms largely loosening regulations on the market, Diaz-Canel said they came from communist ideological devotion.
ONLINE PORTAL USED BY CUBANS IN US TO SEND AID TO RELATIVES CLOSES
“Cuban revolutionaries today face challenges of enormous magnitude that demand unity, ideological steadfastness, courage, boldness, and creative resilience,” the president said.
The effort has so far failed to let up U.S. sanctions, with Tuesday’s new raft of sanctions marking Washington’s first major reaction.