On Thursday, the Treasury and State departments said they are placing new penalties on nine Cuban state-owned companies in mining, metals, and construction, as well as three officials who lead the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, known as ICAP.
This announcement followed an operation at Miami International Airport where several Americans coming back from Cuba were briefly detained and questioned, according to U.S. officials who spoke anonymously to the Associated Press. Some travelers had their phones, laptops, and tablets taken for inspection.
Officials said agents were ready to send dozens of travelers to secondary screening by Customs and Border Protection, but fewer people met the criteria than expected. Everyone who was detained was eventually allowed to enter the country.
But that may not be the end for those travelers. The same officials said anyone released could still face prosecution if the government decides they broke sanctions law.
This law bans Americans from doing business with any Cuban government-owned company, including restaurants, hotels, and shops across the island. It is still unclear what will happen to the seized devices.
The Americans Were Coming Home From a Birthday Party
The visitors were in Cuba for events marking the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that the gathering was an attempt by the Cuban government to revive what he called a subversive network in the United States. He claimed the regime had been “ferrying a new brigade of international sympathizers to Havana.”
Rubio said ICAP sponsors a network aimed at “identifying, cultivating, and radicalizing” Americans, and framed Thursday’s action as a response to what he described as decades of anti-American activity.
The State Department had already designated ICAP under an executive order in June, and in July Rubio stripped the legal status of a former ICAP employee living in the United States and ordered him and his family deported.
The three officials named on Thursday are ICAP president Fernando González Llort, first vice president Noemí Ramona Rabaza Fernández, and North America director Leima Martínez Freire. González Llort was one of five Cuban intelligence officers arrested in Florida in 1998. He served his full sentence and was released in 2014.
Set against the individual designations, the list of companies is less publicized but may have a bigger impact. It includes a nickel producer, a mineral resources company, two firms that import heavy industrial goods, two more that import vehicles, auto parts, and construction materials, a company that supplies Cuban labor to foreign businesses on the island, and Cuba’s Ministry of Construction.
Rubio said these targets support the government by controlling important parts of the economy. Thursday’s announcement stands out because of the current situation in Cuba.
Since January, when American forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and Washington cut off the oil his government had been supplying to Havana, Cuba has been under what amounts to a fuel blockade.
The result has been an accelerating collapse of the Cuban economy, with nationwide grid failures, hospitals rationing power, tens of thousands of postponed surgeries and the near-total disappearance of public transportation.
Roughly 11 million people now live with outages that stretch past two days, and residents in Havana and other cities have staged neighborhood protests, banging pots and burning trash in the street.
Ordinary life now runs on whatever schedule the electricity keeps. Reporting from Havana this month described families cooking beans at three in the morning because that is when the power happened to return.
In July, U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said the fuel restrictions and tougher sanctions are directly hurting Cuban civilians, especially the most vulnerable. He also said hospitals lack essential medicine and supplies.
Rubio disagreed, telling Al Jazeera in March that the administration had not taken any punitive action against the Cuban government.
The Part Nobody in the Administration Is Hiding
Trump has not been subtle about the goal. He has talked openly about taking the island, telling reporters in March that he believed he would have the honor of doing it and that he could do anything he wanted with a nation that weak.
He has floated a friendly takeover and a not-so-friendly one. His administration has raised the prospect of military action against Cuba more than once, including while U.S. forces were engaged against Iran.
The Cuban Embassy did not respond right away to a request for comment on the new sanctions. Havana has repeatedly called the embargo collective punishment of a poor country.
There are real debates to be had about the Cuban government, its treatment of dissidents, and its intelligence services. But that is not what happened at the Miami airport last weekend. What happened was that American citizens returned from a trip abroad and federal agents took their phones
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