SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Washington has leveled new sanctions against a group of Cuban state-run companies, a move that economic analysts say will likely drive off foreign investors and push Cuba’s struggling economy even deeper into crisis.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the penalties target five Cuban entities, three of which are tied to a powerful business conglomerate known as GAESA — short for Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. The conglomerate is run by Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and is believed to control nearly 40% of the island’s entire economy. As of early 2024, it held approximately $14.5 billion in liquid reserves.
“The situation in Cuba is devolving as the island’s corrupt, brutal and anti-American Communist regime continues to prioritize its own total control over the freedom, opportunity and basic well-being of the Cuban people,” Rubio wrote on social media platform X.
Rubio, who is himself the son of Cuban immigrants, charged that the “regime elites” were exploiting GAESA to “steal the island’s few resources, diverting them for repression, anti-American subversion and spying instead of schools, power plants, and basic necessities for the Cuban people.”
Cuba’s foreign affairs minister, Bruno Rodríguez, pushed back sharply, calling Rubio “dishonest and mendacious.” He wrote on X: “Cuba has proven stronger, more capable, and more effective than he anticipated in the face of the ruthless aggression and collective punishment inflicted upon its people and their living conditions. What this individual is promoting from the world’s greatest power is a crime.”
Under the sanctions, any person or business that provides services to the designated Cuban entities risks being penalized and cut off from the U.S. financial system.
Michael Bustamante, a professor and chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, explained the intended effect: “By designating specific entities, they’re making it clear to foreign investors: ‘If your business in Cuba touches any of these folks, you risk being banned.’” He added, “For most of these companies, it’s a bridge too far.”
One of the five sanctioned entities is Almacenes Universales S.A., also called AUSA, which serves as Cuba’s primary logistics and warehousing operation. It underpins the country’s entire import and export system and is the main storage provider used by Cuba’s government, its private sector, and international business partners, according to Bustamante. If companies begin avoiding this storage network, he warned, it could disrupt the flow of goods into the country and lead to humanitarian consequences.
Also on the sanctions list is Rafin S.A., which Bustamante described as a “very opaque” company he believes functions as the government’s corporate financial arm inside GAESA. While it is not a bank, he said it holds capital for both the government and GAESA and may be involved in financial transactions.
“That would also seemingly throw more cold water on the foreign investors that are already there,” Bustamante said.
A third GAESA-connected entity to be sanctioned is Banco Financiero Internacional S.A., a commercial bank that Bustamante described as a critical institution for foreign investors operating in Cuba. “If you don’t have a bank where you can go as a foreign investor, it makes your operations logistically quite difficult, to put it mildly,” he said.
Rounding out the list are Geominera S.A., a government-owned mining company, and Empresa Siderúrgica Jose Martí, which the U.S. identified as Cuba’s largest producer of raw steel. Additionally, sanctions were imposed on Annalie Lilliam Rueda Cardero, the daughter-in-law of former President Raúl Castro.
These latest actions follow a recent series of sanctions that have already targeted GAESA itself and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Bustamante raised broader questions about the administration’s long-term strategy: “It’s very, very hard to suss out what’s going on here. Is this setting the table for the great sale of Cuba state assets to the highest bidder or the lowest bidder?…Is this part of the recipe of a hostile takeover?”
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has continued to press for a transformation of Cuba’s political and economic structure, arguing that the island poses a threat to the United States due to its ties with American adversaries. Cuba’s government has repeatedly denied being a threat.
Separately, Cuba announced a set of economic reforms last week that Bustamante called “potentially the most significant liberalization of the Cuban economy in 60 years,” though he noted that significant questions and doubts remain about their implementation. Despite those moves, the U.S. is “giving no signal of encouragement that this is even vaguely, partially in the right direction,” Bustamante said.
Cuba is already grappling with widespread power outages, shortages of food and water, and a deteriorating healthcare system — conditions that stem in part from a U.S. energy blockade. In late January, President Trump threatened tariffs against any country that sells or supplies oil to Cuba, which had been heavily dependent on oil shipments from Venezuela — shipments that were halted after the U.S. took action against that South American nation.
