Trump ramps up Cuba pressure with new sanctions and crackdown on US visitors

President Donald Trump's administration has intensified financial restrictions on Cuba, targeting key commercial sectors and strengthening the enforcement of rules prohibiting American visitors from transacting with state-affiliated entities.

The Treasury and State departments announced measures Thursday against nine government-run mining, metal and construction firms, alongside leadership at the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, known as ICAP. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the group of directing "a vast subversive network in the United States aimed at identifying, cultivating, and radicalizing" Americans.

Rubio noted in a statement that the Cuban government recently tried to use the centenary of Fidel Castro to expand those efforts: "Just days ago, the regime attempted to use Communist kingpin and despot Fidel Castro’s 100th birthday to reinvigorate this subversive network, ferrying a new brigade of international sympathizers to Havana to network with regime officials," Rubio said.

“The Trump Administration will not stand by while a hostile foreign power seeks to exploit our freedoms — none of which are afforded to its people — by misleading and corrupting American citizens with lies, spy tradecraft, and other malfeasance as part of the regime’s raison d’être of exporting Marxism, racial resentment, and Communist violence across the world,” Rubio said.

Trump's Republican administration has steadily ratcheted up pressure on Havana, threatening it with potential military intervention even when mired in a conflict against Iran, while also boosting economic sanctions designed to cut off funding for the Cuban government. An oil blockade that the U.S. imposed on Cuba after the American military raid that ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, whose country provided Cuba with free oil, has plunged the already economically crippled island into full-blown crisis.

The Cuban Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new sanctions. Cuba routinely denounces U.S. sanctions and the decadeslong embargo it has imposed on the island, accusing multiple administrations of unfairly targeting a poor nation and its people merely for ideological differences and its proximity to the United States.

The latest sanctions follow an operation at the Miami airport last weekend in which several American citizens returning to the U.S. from Cuba after participating in events marking Castro’s birthday were briefly detained, according to U.S. officials. Some of them had their cellphones and other personal electronic devices seized for inspection, the officials said.

U.S. authorities had been prepared to detain dozens of returning activists for secondary screening, but far fewer were found to meet the criteria for the enhanced questioning by Customs and Border Protection agents, the officials said. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because details of the operation have not been made public, said those detained were eventually released and allowed to enter the U.S.

The officials said anyone detained and released could still face prosecution if it is found they violated U.S.