The Donald Trump U.S. administration imposed sweeping sanctions on three leaders of a Cuban private diplomacy group and nine entities including Cuba's Ministry of Construction and state-owned corporations.
The U.S. State Department said in a news release on the 20th (local time) that the move is to "intensify comprehensive efforts to root out the Cuban regime's malign activities in Cuba and across our hemisphere."
The sanctions target five government agencies, including Cuba's Ministry of Construction, and four state-owned corporations such as nickel and cobalt mining and processing companies. In addition, three people, including Fernando González Llort, the president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), which the Trump administration designated for sanctions in June, were also named in this round.
According to Agence France-Presse, Minister Marco Rubio said ICAP is a "political subordinate body of the Cuban government" and explained that, under the pretext of education and cultural exchanges, it has continued large-scale subversive operations in the United States aimed at identifying, cultivating and radicalizing regime-change forces.
In particular, President Llort was convicted in the United States in the 1990s on charges of being a Cuban spy and served 15 years. After returning to Cuba, he attempted to destabilize the United States through ICAP, according to Minister Rubio. The Minister said the group tried to bring international sympathizers into Havana to make contact with Cuban officials on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro's birth.
Minister Rubio also cited several state-owned corporations in the metals and mining fields along with Cuba's Ministry of Construction, saying they "buttress the regime's repressive apparatus through control of core economic institutional sector," as reasons for including them in the sanctions list. He added that it is a "hostile foreign force that makes exporting Marxism, racial anger, and communist violence the purpose of the regime's survival," and said, "The Trump administration will not stand by as the Cuban regime seeks to continue decades of subversive anti-American activities."