Cuba
The United States sanctions President Miguel Diaz-Canel
Four years after the historic demonstrations in Cuba, Washington sanctions the president of the island and his key ministers.
Miguel Diaz-Canel, president of Cuba, during a plenary session of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, on July 7, 2025.
AFP
The United States announced unpublished sanctions against Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel on Friday, four years just after the historic demonstrations against the government that had shaken the communist island.
The State Department has set up visa restrictions against Miguel Diaz-Canel sanctioned “for its role in the brutality of the regime against the people,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio on his account X.
Other “key figures of the Cuban regime”, such as the Minister of Defense, Alvaro Lopez Miera, and that of the interior, Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas, are also targeted, he said.
The president and senior Cuban officials are sanctioned for “their involvement in blatant human rights violations,” the state department said in a statement.
Up to 25 years in prison
Visa restrictions are also applied to “many Cuban judicial and penitentiary leaders involved in unjust detention and torture of demonstrators in July 2021”, according to the same source.
Several hundred Cubans have been sentenced to sentences of up to 25 years in prison for participating in antigrency demonstrations of July 11 and 12, 2021, the most important since the 1959 Castor revolution. Some have been released in recent months after serving their sentence.
Others were released as part of an agreement negotiated under the auspices of the Vatican after the withdrawal, in January, of the island of the black American list of countries supporting terrorism by ex-president Joe Biden (2021-2015). A decision revoked later by Donald Trump.
The agreement provided for the release of 553 Cuban prisoners, but part of the demonstrators in July 2021 are still imprisoned.
Prohibited places
The United States “can impose migratory sanctions against revolutionary leaders and maintain an prolonged and merciless economic war against Cuba, but they do not have the capacity to bend the will of this people or its leaders,” reacted the head of Cuban diplomacy, Bruno Rodriguez on X.
The Secretary of State also accused the Cuban power of torturing the dissident José Daniel Ferrer, incarcerated in the east of the country, and required “proof of immediate life”.
Historical dissident, José Daniel Ferrer, 54, was released within the framework of the agreement negotiated with the Vatican, before being incarcerated again after the revocation of his parole.
The State Department has also added a 42 -storey state hotel recently inaugurated in Havana, on the list of places forbidden to the Americans “to prevent US dollars from funding the repression of the Cuban regime”. “While the Cuban people suffer from shortages of food, water, drugs and electricity, the diet dilapid money,” said Marco Rubio.
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