US Sanctions Cuba's State Oil Company, Raising Tensions

The US government announced sanctions against Cuba’s state-owned oil and gas company on Thursday in a move expected to increase tensions between the two countries.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted that key assets of the company, known as Cupet, were “unlawfully expropriated from American owners years ago.”

He also accused Cuba’s government of weaponising energy.

“While the Cuban people have suffered fuel shortages and blackouts because of decades of under-investment in critical infrastructure, Cuba’s Communist leaders have diverted energy resources to line their own pockets,” Rubio said in a statement.

He further noted, without providing evidence, that Cuban officials “resell countless barrels of scarce energy on the secondary market, hoarding energy supplies for its military, intelligence and repressive forces, and rationing energy as a tool of social control.”

The Cuban government did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. It has previously said that sanctions punish all Cubans and are aimed at strangling the economy to destabilise both the government and its people.

Cupet’s fuel sales to the public are almost non-existent and are currently rationed.

Ricardo Herrero, a Cuban economist based in the US and executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan organisation based in Washington, said he was “genuinely vexed” by the move.

“How are private importers supposed to store diesel and get it into vehicles without using CUPET facilities?,” he wrote on X.

“This undermines what, until this morning, had been a humanitarian priority for the US. Either something much bigger is afoot, or we’ve entered the “indiscriminate cruelty” phase of this policy.”

Thursday's announcement comes almost a week after the US government sanctioned Cuban PresidentMiguel Díaz-Canel and other officials, as well as several institutions.

Rubio said in a statement that all property or interests of Cupet located in the US or in possession or control of US people are blocked.

“President Trump wants a new future for the Cuban people with greater economic and political freedom and opportunity,” Rubio wrote on X.

“Until then, we will continue to target the Communist regime’s ability to leverage its energy trade to further its corrupt agenda and violently repress the Cuban people.”

Cuba is already struggling under a decades-old embargo and a lack of petroleum as the US keeps pushing for a change in its economic and political model.

Power outages, already common given the economic and energetic crisis gripping the island for the past five years, have only intensified since Trump threatened tariffs in late January on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba.

Both countries have acknowledged that they have held talks, but the scope of them is unknown.

Meanwhile, Trump has been threatening military action in Cuba ever since the US military invaded Venezuela and arrested former President Nicolás Maduro.

Last Thursday, Trump said Cuba has “sort of collapsed” and said “we’re going to handle that as soon as we’ve finished” military operations in Iran.