Marco Rubio speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 15, 2025. (Yuri Gripas, Abaca Press/TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday reversed the last-minute decision by former President Joe Biden to remove sanctions on Cuban military companies and is extending the list of banned entities to include the Cuban company — secretly run by the military — that handles money transfers from Cuban Americans to their families on the island.
The move likely means Western Union and other Miami-based agencies partnering with the Cuban company, Orbit SA, will be forced to cut ties with the firm to comply with the sanctions, suspending official remittance channels to the island until the Cuban government finds a non-military company to provide the same service.
Cuban Americans send millions of dollars to their loved ones on the island through the remittance companies each year.
Rubio also said he had revoked Biden’s decision to suspend a provision in the Helms-Burton Act that has allowed Cuban Americans to sue companies profiting from confiscated properties known as Title III.
The measures add to President Donald Trump’s “decisive action” on his first day in office to keep Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, “where it belongs,” Rubio said.
“The Cuban regime has long supported acts of international terrorism. We call for the regime to end its support for terrorism and to stop providing food, housing, and medical care to foreign murderers, bombmakers, and hijackers while Cubans go hungry and lack access to basic medicine,” Rubio said.
Rubio said he had ordered Friday to re-create the Cuba Restricted List that Biden had eliminated in his last week in office to “deny resources to the very branches of the Cuban regime that directly oppress and surveil the Cuban people while controlling large swaths of the country’s economy.”
Rubio, at the time a U.S. senator from Florida, had actively contributed to drafting the sanctions against the Cuban military, including the Cuba Restricted List, during Trump’s first term.
The Cuba restricted list included several companies and hotels owned by a Cuban military conglomerate known as GAESA. The Miami Herald recently reported that just one of its companies had $4.3 billion on hand while hospitals were collapsing, children were going hungry, and the island was going dark because of its poorly maintained infrastructure.
The Herald also reported on leaked documents showing that Orbit SA, an entity appearing to have no links to the Cuban military, was secretly run by CIMEX, one of GAESA’s leading holding companies.
“The Trump Administration is restoring a tough Cuba policy that protects America and helps the Cuban people,” Rubio announced on X. “We’ve maintained Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list – where it belongs – and taken other steps. The Cuban regime’s oppression of its people and malign actions must end.”
Biden took Cuba off the list of countries that sponsor terrorism and eliminated the Cuba Restricted List as part of a deal brokered by the Vatican to release political prisoners. Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote to the pope earlier this month that his government would release 553 prisoners. But just around the time Trump took office and reinstated Cuba on the terror list, Cuban authorities stopped releasing prisoners.
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