US President Trump’s June 30 executive order reinstated all the sanctions against Cuba that Biden had lifted, and implemented new measures against Cuban companies with alleged ties to the socialist country’s military.
“President Trump is committed to fostering a free and democratic Cuba, addressing the Cuban people’s long-standing suffering under a Communist regime,” reads a White House fact sheet, which accuses the Cuban government of harboring “fugitives of American justice.” Cuba has granted political asylum of Black liberation activist Assata Shakur, who escaped the US prison system after facing what a United Nations Commission on Human Rights called “cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Trump’s latest memo on Cuba isn’t just ‘tougher policy,’ it’s a declaration of economic warfare designed to squeeze the life out of the Cuban people,” said Manolo De Los Santos, Cuba solidarity activist and Executive Director of the Peoples Forum, in a post on X. “This isn’t about freedom, it’s about starvation as a weapon, a cruel attempt to force Cubans to surrender their independence.” US sanctions and the economic blockade against Cuba have resulted in a humanitarian crisis on the island.
Cuban officials have also denounced Trump’s tightening of the economic blockade against Cuba, which has been condemned by almost every single country on Earth. Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez wrote on X that the executive order is “criminal behavior,” and “violates the human rights of an entire nation.”
The government of Venezuela, another nation embattled by US sanctions, issued a letter in solidarity with Cuba, declaring the executive order an “anachronistic, inhuman policy.”
The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) issued a statement condemning the “strengthening of the aggression and economic blockade.” “The real objective of the U.S. government is to take over Cuba and control its destiny,” the intergovernmental organization wrote, whose member countries include Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Venezuela.
Donald Trump, along with his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been determined to escalate the economic blockade against Cuba since Trump began his second term in January of this year. One of Trump’s first acts upon entering the office for the second time was to re-add Cuba to the US State Department’s list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism,” only days after his predecessor had lifted this designation. Trump also recently resurrected one of his first-term policies, the travel ban, which includes a limitation on travel from Cuba.
