This Thursday, the United States Department of the Treasury imposed financial sanctions on the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, several of his relatives and Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín, son of former president Raúl Castro.
The Treasury included Lis Cuesta Peraza, Díaz-Canel’s wife, and Manuel Anido Cuesta, the president’s stepson, who resides in Madrid, on the sanctions list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Raúl Alejandro Castro Calis, grandson of Raúl Castro and son of Alejandro Castro Espín, was also sanctioned.
The Donald Trump Administration also imposed sanctions on the Cuban Ministry of the Armed Forces and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), a network of neighborhood committees created to articulate popular support for the communist revolution.
The list of sanctioned entities is completed with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People, the La Victoria mining company and the Amistur travel agency.
The sanctions imply the prohibition of carrying out financial and commercial transactions with designated persons and entities, whose assets under US jurisdiction are blocked.
Press that press
This round of sanctions is part of the pressure strategy that the Trump Government exerts on Cuba to force economic and political changes on the island.
Since the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January, in a US military attack in Venezuela, Trump has imposed an oil blockade on Cuba that has worsened its economic crisis and has threatened on several occasions to “take control” of the island.
Last month, the Department of Justice also presented an indictment against Raúl Castro, former president and younger brother of Fidel Castro, for his alleged responsibility in the downing, in 1996, of two small planes belonging to a Cuban exile organization that caused the death of four people.
In this context, Washington and Havana have held discreet negotiations in which Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, one of Raúl Castro’s grandsons, known as “El Cangrejo”, would have served as one of the Cuban interlocutors.
The Government of Cuba insists that any change in the country must be decided by the Cuban people and denounces that the United States is preparing military aggression against the island.
Havana’s response
After hearing the news, Díaz-Canel criticized the “illegitimate sanctions list” of the United States Department of the Treasury. “The US president makes new threatening statements against Cuba; and the Treasury Department added new names of Cuban leaders, organizations and companies to an illegitimate sanctions list,” the president wrote on social networks.
He also stated that Washington’s sanctions on the island “are aimed at reinforcing the blockade measures and the conflict scenario between Cuba and the United States.” “This political blindness adds to the coercive measures applied in recent weeks against our country, designed to harm the Cuban people,” he added.
He also assured that “the aggressiveness and perversion of the Yankee government,” in reference to Washington, will clash with Cuba’s decision “to face the worst scenarios and resist the imperial onslaught.”
Later, in an interview with elDiario.es Published this Friday, the president has stated that Trump intends the economic, financial and energy “suffocation” of Cuba to provoke a “social explosion” and have such a “pretext” to intervene, although his government, he emphasizes, does not want war, but dialogue. “But we are not afraid of war and we are preparing to face military aggression,” he warns, according to the Cuban defense doctrine of participation of “all the people.”
“We are not afraid of war and we prepare to face military aggression”
Invading Cuba would cost hundreds of thousands of Cuban lives, he admits, “but it would also cost the invader great human losses in all types of cases,” he warns of an eventual US military intervention. The outcome would be “complex” for the United States and Cuba themselves, “but it would also be a threat to the stability and security of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he predicts.
“Cuba is a country that wants peace,” he reiterates, however, “we are a country of peace. It is a lie what representatives of the (North American) Government say that Cuba is a threat to the national security of the United States,” he delves into the interview. And he adds: “We are going to continue defending peace, seeking dialogue and ensuring that dialogue allows us to resolve the contradictions that we have in our bilateral relations and that keeps us away from confrontation.”
