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The United States has imposed new sanctions on Cuba’s state-owned oil and gas company, Unión Cuba-Petróleo.
Getting into it: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the measures Thursday, freezing any US-based assets the company holds and barring firms with US operations from doing business with it. Rubio branded the company a tool of “repression and self-serving regime kleptocracy,” accusing Cuba’s leaders of diverting energy to “line their own pockets” while ordinary Cubans wait weeks for fuel, and said its assets had been “unlawfully expropriated from American owners” decades ago.
Separately, the State Department blocked a Florida firm’s plan to ship 250,000 barrels of gas and diesel to the island, citing a missing license.
The sanctions tighten a fuel blockade Trump has built since January, first cutting off Cuba’s ally Venezuela after US forces invaded and captured President Nicolas Maduro, then threatening tariffs on any country shipping oil to Cuba, all atop the decades-old US embargo. Cuba produces only about 40% of the oil it needs, and imports have all but dried up, with just a single Russian tanker reaching the island since late January.
The fuel cutoff has prompted UN human rights chief Volker Türk to warn that the sanctions are directly harming Cubans. In a statement earlier this week, Türk claimed that “children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies” and demanded the measures be lifted immediately, amid global accusations of “economic genocide.” The administration, for its part, lays Cuba’s growing humanitarian crisis at the feet of the Cuban government.
This all comes as Trump has floated the idea of an invasion more than once to bring down the government, comparing his aims for Cuba to the Venezuela operation that ended in Maduro’s reign in Venezeula. Trump recently claimed that the Cuban government is on its “last moments of life.”
Notably, the US indicted former President Raul Castro, sanctioned President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and stationed the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in the Caribbean, all in the last 30 days.
