Cuba has announced new pro-market reforms amid threats of military attack by the administration of US President Donald Trump.
The United States has announced a new set of economic sanctions targeting Cuba. This is the latest step in a campaign to strain the country’s already fragile economy.
The US State Department on Thursday announced sanctions against several Cuban companies and Fidel Ernesto Castro, 31, the grandson of former leader Raul Castro, 95.
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“Cuba’s communist regime elite rules a failed state where ordinary Cubans are starving,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a social media post Thursday.
Since January, President Donald Trump has stepped up his campaign to undermine Cuba’s government in an effort to force regime change.
Part of that campaign included a series of tightened sanctions and a de facto fuel blockade. Cuba was already under a historic decades-long U.S. embargo dating back to the Cold War.
But Rubio insisted more action was needed to punish decades of mismanagement and repression by Cuba’s leadership.
He also accused Cuba of trying to “export subversive Marxist ideology to the United States and other countries in the Western Hemisphere,” echoing President Trump’s assertion that Cuba is a national security threat.
Since launching an increased pressure campaign in January, Cuba has taken steps to defuse criticism.
In June, it passed the biggest free market reform in decades, including 176 new measures. It also releases prisoners of war as a “humanitarian and sovereign act.”
Further reforms were announced on Thursday, with 34 pages of legal changes aimed at easing regulations and state control in industries such as tourism.
Under the new rules, private companies will be able to establish travel agencies and travel agencies independent of the Cuban government. It also eliminates the need to contract employees through state agencies.
It will also become easier for some domestic investors to open foreign bank accounts.
But these measures have so far done little to appease the Trump administration.
Since the beginning of the year, the United States has repeatedly threatened military intervention against Cuba and continued its sanctions campaign.
Critics have warned that the combination of sanctions and the ongoing energy blockade is pushing the country’s power grid and health system to the brink of collapse.
In June, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called for an end to the restrictions, saying they were “directly harming the Cuban people.”
“Children are dying because doctors can’t get essential medical supplies and medicines,” Turk said. “This is unacceptable.”
Rubio, meanwhile, blamed the Cuban government, which has been a thorn in Washington’s side since its 1959 leftist revolution, for the country’s poor economic situation.
Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, in an interview published Thursday in state newspaper Granma, accused the United States of fabricating threats as a pretext to put pressure on the country.
“The truth is, Cuba does not threaten U.S. national security or the U.S. economy, nor does it want to,” he said. “The accusation that Cuba supports terrorism actually reveals a lack of seriousness on the part of the U.S. government.”
In addition to targeting the Castro family, Thursday’s new sanctions also target two companies involved in Cuba’s nickel mining industry, two companies active in Cuba’s struggling energy sector, including an oil import company, and the state bank Banco Exterior de Cuba.
