Washington, July 12, 2025 (RTSG) – The United States on Friday black-listed Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and several senior ministers, citing “gross human-rights abuses” tied to the island’s July 2021 protest wave.
Announcing the move on the fourth anniversary of those demonstrations, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington was also imposing visa bans on Cuban judges and prison officers “responsible for, or complicit in, the unjust detention and torture of the July 2021 protesters.”
“The U.S. will continue to stand for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people of Cuba, and make clear no illegitimate, dictatorial regimes are welcome in our hemisphere,” Rubio wrote on X.
Alongside Díaz-Canel, the sanctions target Defense Minister Álvaro López Miera and Interior Minister Lázaro Álvarez Casas. The trio join a growing roster of Cuban officials already restricted under the Global Magnitsky framework and long-standing U.S. embargo rules first imposed in 1962.
Havana blasted the announcement. Johana Tablada, deputy chief for U.S. affairs at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry, branded Rubio a “defender of genocide, prisons and mass deportations,” and argued the new penalties aim to deepen the economic squeeze that U.N. estimates say has cost Cuba “trillions” of dollars over six decades.
Navigating the decades-long embargo has been one of the primary challenges for Havana particularly with the collapse of the Communist Bloc which left Cuba isolated and without its main trading partners. With this collapse the Cuban economy saw a decline in GDP of around 40%, however in the years since then Cuba has adapted and increasingly built ties with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the People’s Republic of China.
This new swing at Havana comes after Trump’s June 30 signing of a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on Cuba which reestablished the statutory ban on U.S. tourism to Cuba, prohibited unlicensed leisure travel, requires audits and five-year retention of all travel-related records to ensure compliance, and bans both direct and indirect financial transactions with Cuban state entities controlled by the military (such as GAESA) and instructs the Secretary of State to publish and maintain a blacklist of these entities.
The rallies of 11–12 July 2021 erupted over blackouts and shortages. Cuban prosecutors later said 790 people faced charges ranging from public disorder to sabotage. Havana insists the protests were fueled by a “U.S. media campaign” and the embargo’s economic toll, the U.S. has long funded opposition groups in Cuba as well as backing anti-government cultural figures.
Friday’s action and the June 30 memorandum mark the toughest U.S. stance since 2021, when the Biden administration sanctioned López Miera and Cuba’s Special National Brigade. By pulling Díaz-Canel himself into the net, Washington signals it is willing to escalate pressure even as Havana’s economy struggles with fuel scarcities, soaring inflation, and another summer of power cuts.
Source: ABC News
Written by Louis, Edited by Seraph
