Caribbean & Central America - August 2025

Marking the fourth anniversary of Cuba’s anti-government protests of July 2021, the US administration led by President Donald Trump has announced additional economic sanctions.

For the first time the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has been directly sanctioned by Washington, accused of responsibility for “gross violations of human rights”. There are also sanctions against his defence and security ministers, Álvaro López Miera and Lázaro Álvarez Casas respectively. All three men are now banned from visiting the US (something Díaz-Canel has done on several occasions to attend meetings at the United Nations in New York). The US State Department also announced that US citizens and corporates will henceforth be banned from doing business with 11 hotels, including the recently completed Torre K in Havana, and from transactions with Grupo de Administracion Empresarial SA (Gaesa), the state-owned military conglomerate, and its affiliates.

In macro-economic terms these latest sanctions will have relatively limited effect. Cuban economist Omar Pérez Villanueva was cited by Spanish daily El País in a July report as saying “All these new measures tend to reinforce the US blockade of Cuba, but they won’t be a major blow [because]…many of the foreign countries with ties to Cuba have already been pressured, and American tourists are no longer coming to the country as they used to.”

In fact, the macro-economic situation of the island is extremely fragile. Tourism arrivals fell by 25% in the first half of 2025. Official data is unreliable, but the government has admitted that the economy contracted 1.1% last year and has not yet recovered to pre-coronavirus (Covid-19) levels. Constant power plant breakdowns mean only half the population has electricity at any given time. There is a chronic lack of foreign currency. The health service, social safety nets, agriculture, and industry are all in crisis. The labour minister, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, was forced to resign on 15 July after wrongly claiming that there are no beggars in the country. A report released in July 2024 by Spain-based NGO Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos (OCDH) on the state of social rights in Cuba estimated 89% of Cuban families suffered from extreme poverty.

Admitting errors

For decades Cuban governments have blamed the US trade embargo as the main cause of all their economic difficulties. This remains the case, but in his speech to mark the anniversary of the 26 July 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks (in effects the beginning of the Cuban Revolution) President Díaz-Canel adopted a more self-critical tone, admitting that his government needs to correct internal “errors” and “deficiencies”.