The Trump administration on Thursday expanded U.S. sanctions against Cuba, targeting the nation’s construction ministry, eight state-owned companies, and a nonprofit believed to have ties to Cuba’s spy network.
The new economic penalties are intended to ratchet up the pressure on Cuba’s Communist government, which President Trump has been seeking to overthrow and replace with leadership more friendly to the United States. Earlier this month, the C.I.A. — which has sought to depose the Cuban Communist Party since the 1960s — established a secret task force aimed at using covert means to achieve regime change in Cuba.
Human rights experts with the United Nations have accused the United States of causing a severe humanitarian crisis in Cuba through its economic pressure campaign, including persistent blackouts, food insecurity and critical shortages of medicine.
“Energy, transport, irrigation and basic services are failing simultaneously, disproportionately affecting women, children, older persons and other vulnerable groups, including peasant farmers in the rural economy,” the experts said in a statement from the U.N. human rights office earlier this month.
The eight Cuban companies added to a U.S. sanctions database are in the fields of mining, metallurgy, motor vehicles, trade and labor contracting. They join an already long list of sanctioned persons, companies and government ministries in Cuba.
The Trump administration has oscillated between wanting to work with Cuba’s Communist government and developing plans to overthrow it. But administration officials have in recent days accused Cuba in hyperbolic terms of seeking to corrupt American citizens by “exporting Marxism” and “racial resentment,” and of waging “a revolution against Western civilization itself.”
“Today’s designations make clear that the Trump administration will not tolerate the Cuban regime’s efforts to fund its repression or continue its decades-long campaign of subversive anti-American activities,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose family immigrated from Cuba, said in a statement.
The Cuban Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has waged an intense campaign of economic warfare against Cuba since the capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who was a close ally of Cuba’s government. Mr. Trump has said Cuba will be the next leftist Latin American government to fall, now that the United States effectively controls Venezuela’s government.
Cuba’s economy has suffered significant damage from an oil blockade that Mr. Trump imposed in February. The blockade has plunged Cuba into its worst-ever energy crisis, forcing nationwide blackouts and reducing residents to cooking without gas or electricity.
Thursday’s sanctions were also aimed at leaders of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, which worked with a convoy of ships carrying aid that tried to alleviate the U.S. blockade earlier this year. Organizers describe the institution as an independent nonprofit, while declassified C.I.A. reports label the group as a front for Cuban intelligence services and a tool for state propaganda.
