The Cuban Foreign Ministry on Tuesday strongly condemned the United States' latest move to tighten its policy toward the island nation, after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum imposing new restrictions on financial transactions and travel.
According to a fact sheet issued by the White House, the memorandum enforces the legal ban on U.S. tourism to Cuba by requiring mandatory record-keeping of all travel-related transactions for a minimum of five years and conducting regular audits to ensure compliance.
Cuba said that this memorandum is a revised version of a 2017 document of the same name. Since the 2017 memorandum's implementation, the U.S. has maintained an eight-year blockade against Cuba, disrupting fuel supplies and obstructing remittances. During this period, Americans were nearly entirely barred from traveling to Cuba. The U.S. also pressured global commercial and financial entities to sever ties with Cuba and unlawfully listed it in "state sponsors of terrorism", causing severe damage to Cuba's economy.
On the first day of his second term in January, Trump, who has always been tough on Cuba, reversed the decision made by his predecessor Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the list of "state sponsors of terrorism" before leaving office.
For more than 30 years, the United Nations General Assembly has been calling on the U.S. to end the economic blockade imposed on Cuba since 1962.
On the day when Trump signed the memorandum, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla blasted the memorandum as "a criminal behavior that violates the human rights of an entire nation."
The Presidential Memorandum vs. Cuba released today by the U.S. government strengthens the aggression and economic blockade that punishes the whole Cuban people and is the main obstacle to our development, he said on the social platform X.
Cuba denounces US move to tighten economic blockade
Cuba denounces US move to tighten economic blockade
