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The United States has imposed fresh sanctions on Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, his family, and members of the Castro family.
Getting into it: The Treasury Department’s action Thursday hit Díaz-Canel along with his wife, Lis Cuesta Peraza, and his stepson, as well as Alejandro Castro Espín (the son of former President Raúl Castro) and a Castro grandson. The sanctions, issued under a Trump executive order, also targeted the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces plus a string of other government bodies, including the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and a Cuban friendship institute.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the move as going after “the network that enables and funds Cuba’s subversive and radical operations,” vowing that the US would “no longer tolerate radical Marxist regimes” exporting their “poisonous and evil ‘revolution.'” The State Department went further in a statement, casting Havana as a decades-old “forward operating base” for left-wing “irregular warfare” against US interests.
Díaz-Canel condemned the sanctions, accused Trump of escalating the conflict with measures “designed to harm the Cuban people,” and vowed to “resist the imperial onslaught.” Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called the “vile inclusion” of the president part of a “U.S. interventionist plan to portray Cuba as a threat.” Cuesta Peraza, the president’s wife, struck a more sardonic note on X, writing that it was “almost an honor to be on this ‘list.'”
The sanctions are the latest turn in a months-long pressure campaign, with Trump openly musing about a “friendly takeover” of the island and floating Cuba as the next domino to drop after Venezuela and Iran. “We’ll take care of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and as soon as that’s done, on our way back, we’ll just make a little brief stop over,” he said Thursday. Asked whether he was trying to speed up Cuba’s collapse, Trump said he just wanted “a nicely run country,” before pivoting to describe the island as “a beautiful piece of land” where “you could have beautiful resorts.”
This all comes as ordinary Cubans bear the brunt of a deepening crisis, with a US fuel blockade that Trump has enforced since the start of the year leaving the island without enough diesel to run its generators, triggering blackouts that can drag on for nearly a full day and severe shortages of food, water, and medicine that have left it leaning on outside help from Mexico and China.
