WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday broadening US sanctions against the Cuban government, two White House officials said, as he seeks to put more pressure on Havana after ousting Venezuela’s leader.

The fresh sanctions target people, entities and affiliates that support the Cuban government’s security apparatus or are complicit in corruption or serious human rights violations, as well as agents, officials or supporters of the government, the officials said.

It was not immediately clear who exactly had been hit with sanctions under the order. But a copy of the order released by the White House said the sanctions could apply to “any foreign person” operating in the “energy, defense and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services, or security sector of the Cuban economy, or any other sector of the Cuban economy.” The order authorises secondary sanctions for conducting or facilitating transactions with those targeted under the order, the officials said.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said the new “coercive” measures reinforce the US’s “brutal, genocidal” blockade against the island. “The blockade and its reinforcement cause so much harm because of the intimidating and arrogant behavior of the world’s greatest military power,” Diaz-Canel wrote on social media.

Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, said the sanctions measures, which were announced as the island held its traditional May Day celebrations, aim to impose “collective punishment on the Cuban people” and that Cubans would not be intimidated.

Jeremy Paner, a former sanctions investigator at the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said the move was the most significant one for non-American companies since the US embargo against Cuba began decades ago. “Oil and gas, mining companies, and banks that have carefully segregated their Cuba operations from the United States are no longer protected,” said Paner, who is now a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, a law firm.

Published in Dawn, May 3rd, 2026