The U.S. State Department announced a new round of sanctions Thursday on the crème de la crème of Cuba’s communist Castro family dynasty, including multiple Castro family members and figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Diáz-Canel’s wife and stepson, who has been romantically linked to Hollywood actress Ana de Armas, and several nefarious communist regime organizations were also on the list of designated actors on Thursday. In addition to blocking their ability to do business with American people and businesses, the particular designations handed down on Thursday could also result in foreign third parties being sanctioned under U.S. law for dealings with them.
The State Department announced that it would be imposing designations on five people and five “entities” on Thursday, all under the authority of Executive Order 14404, which allows for expanded sanctions on the Cuban communist regime. In addition to over half a century of extreme human rights abuses against its own people, the Castro regime is a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism, linked to a host of anti-American criminal actors including jihadist terror organizations such as Hezbollah and narco-terror groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
The five people sanctioned in this round are Díaz-Canel and wife Lis Cuesta, Cuesta’s son Manuel Anido Cuesta, and dictator Raúl Castro’s son Alejandro Castro Espin and grandson Raul Alejandro Castro Calis. The organizations are the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba (MINFAR), effectively the leadership of the armed forces of the country; the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), neighborhood spy networks used to intimidate and silence dissent; the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), which foments leftist agitation abroad; and an ICAP subsidiary, Amistur Cuba.
“The Cuban regime continues to demonstrate that it prioritizes the exportation of radical left-wing violence through its malign influence networks and the enrichment of the regime over the well-being of the Cuban people,” the State Department explained in its announcement of the sanctions. “These sanctions are designed to hold international actors supporting the Cuban regime accountable.”
“Foreign banks and companies providing services to those designated are at risk of sanctions and should freeze those activities,” it observed.
The State Department emphasized that the sanctions are a response to “political, ideological, and institutional warfare against the United States” by the government of Cuba in addition to its human rights abuses against the Cuban people.
Several of those mentioned have already faced some American sanctions. Alejandro Castro Espín, for example, and his siblings were banned from entering the United States in 2019. Castro Espín is notoriously one of the most powerful members of the Castro family–significantly more powerful than “president” Díaz-Canel–as he is a senior official within Cuba’s intricate espionage apparatus. His father Raúl Castro was indicted in a U.S. criminal court in May on charges of murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals for his role in the killing of four Cuban-Americans in the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue incident.
Díaz-Canel published a social media rant on Friday condemning the sanctions, while his wife called them “almost an honor.”
“The president of the U.S. makes new threatening declarations against Cuba and the Treasury Department adds new names of Cuban officials, organizations, and companies to an illegitimate list of sanctions,” Díaz-Canel wrote, claiming the sanctions are intended to “hurt the Cuban people.”
“The aggression and perversion of the Yankee government will crash against our resolve to face the worst-case scenarios and resist the imperial assault,” the figurehead predicted.
Cuesta, Díaz-Canel’s spouse, wrote a more succinct reply to the sanctions: [I]t is almost an honor to be on that list.”
“They never tire of ridicule and political stupidity,” she added.
The sanctions expand economic action by the White House to create a realistic application of the “embargo” that has existed symbolically over Cuba for decades, but only lightly enforced. Prior to this week’s designations, the State Department imposed a particularly devastating sanction on Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), a corporate entity controlled by the Cuban military that is used to control the tourism and mining sectors in the country, funneling their profits to bankroll the lavish lifestyles of the Castro family.
As a result, at least four major international hotel chains that worked with GAESA to manage luxury properties on the island have cut back their investment in the country. Most prominently, the Spanish hotel chain Meliá, which manages some of the most expensive hotels in Cuba, announced this week that it would stop operating 15 of its 34 properties there.