The press conference held this Tuesday by hardline anti-Castro politicians and activists, who unabashedly promote even an armed intervention in Cuba, forces me to return to a topic I have touched on in past editions of The Latin American Report. It concerns the mechanisms that U.S. federal laws and regulations enable for certain commercial activities with Cuba despite the comprehensive 64-year-old sanctions regime inaugurated during the John F. Kennedy administration. The latter has been modified on many occasions because of shifts in US foreign policy, very dependent on the party governing the White House.
If we focus on what happened during the first quarter of this century, the pattern reveals itself without much effort: while the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump adopted an aggressive approach—for example, limiting remittance flows and travel licenses—, those of Barack Obama and—certainly to a much lesser extent—Joe Biden's, opted to loosen the stranglehold, especially trying to strengthen the private sector, although there have also been interesting moves benefiting the Cuban government—for example, when Obama left the Oval Office in January 2017, applications for licenses to lease aircraft to Cuba were well received at the Department of Commerce. What is the current state of these regulations? After the brief thaw promoted by Obama's second administration, during which—undoubtedly—we saw the greatest relaxation in the history of the sanctions regime, Trump's first stint as director general of the West Wing meant not only a representative rollback, but the introduction of more specific and aggressive measures, ill-targeted as never before.
Nevertheless, OFAC regulations, and particularly those of the Department of Commerce's BIS, aimed at export controls, still open a wide range of commercial options that are now under the insidious and biased lens of the most retrograde actors of the so-called Cuban exile based in Florida. The narrative they are promoting—basically, that the BIS has granted many Cuba-related licenses in violation of its own regulations—has two probable starting points: a chronic cognitive dissonance, closely linked to extreme ignorance, or intentional manipulation, which would include those cases where they know the truth but are interested in politically profiting from the lie; in truth, I have identified not a few cases of ignorant manipulators, that is, people who do not know the substance of the issue they are talking about, nor are they even interested in knowing it, and only repeat the hawkish-type propaganda with guaranteed success in Miami Dade.
A major conceptual error they repeatedly make is claiming that US law and regulations allow the shipment only of humanitarian items, primarily food and medicine. If they want to change the law—very difficult if not impossible—or push for a change in regulations as well, good luck with that, but since Obama—and through Trump 1.0—it has been absolutely legal to send to Cuba, under general or specific BIS licenses, a much broader range of items, including those that seem to cause great astonishment or rather anger to them, such as jet skis, luxury cars, and hot tubs. For example, the Consumer Communication Devices License Exception enables the export to the Island of many communications-related commodities and software.
The Support for the Cuban People License Exception "authorizes the export or reexport to Cuba of items designated as EAR99, or controlled on the Commerce Control List [...] only for anti-terrorism reasons." These EAR99 items, which include crude oil and petroleum products, must have private sector actors as end-users "for private sector economic activities", or be intended for direct sale to individuals for their personal use. Both variants, as can be seen, are broad in scope. In the same direction is a policy of case-by-case review aimed, for example, at applications for licenses to export or reexport items for "[wholesale] and retail distribution for domestic consumption by the Cuban people." "State-owned enterprises, agencies, and other organizations of the Cuban government that provide goods and services for the use and benefit of the Cuban people" can be final or intermediate recipients of these exports under certain circumstances.
For Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, a chronic liar, the fundamental point is that "the resources that leave the United States for Cuba do not reach the people, they are resources used by the Castro tyranny to stay in power." Congressman Carlos Giménez says he doesn't know, but he hasn't seen many (ordinary) Cubans driving Ferraris and other luxury cars. Both are lost for a very powerful and at the same time understandable reason: they are totally disconnected from Cuban reality after leaving the Island when they were only six years old, in 1971 and 1960, respectively. Of course, part, or a good part, of what enters the country may end up in the hands of government-linked businessmen, but to claim that everything boils down to that dynamic is too simplistic. There are many organic private actors who, due to the State's inability to perform as the main provider of basic goods and services, are now reconfiguring the country's economic map in a direction that, if Giménez and his entire claque looked closely, goes in a quite opposite path to the socialist project of the Cuban Revolution. I can give the example of my locality in the East, where a private entrepreneur with no state support has built an entire economic empire, even expanding his businesses to the neighboring municipality. Then, yes, there may be an elite benefiting from legal trade between the United States and Cuba. But it is an elite larger than what we might call the political elite, although the latter controls—with the grudging blessing of Washington—the critical bureaucracy regarding imports.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric, although he is increasingly open in stating that he does not commune with the Cuban political regime, has recently been the most proactive international leader when it comes to thinking about and testing solutions to the Cuban crisis. Firstly, he ordered the sending of humanitarian aid through UNICEF, but last Friday he also sent a letter to Pope Leo XIV to request that he intervene in the conflict to seek a "sustainable solution." According to an official statement from the General Secretariat of the Presidency cited by EFE, in his letter Boric expresses "Chile's concern for the living conditions of the [Cuban] population and [points out] that the situation currently facing Cuba has acquired a worrying humanitarian dimension, directly impacting the supply of food, the operation of hospitals, public transport, and the electricity supply."
Cuba has turned to electric tricycles for local transport as fuel became scarce after the US cut off oil exports from Venezuela and threatened penalties for countries that supplied the island https://t.co/klCxt4GhM9 pic.twitter.com/GjZzTSBdSz
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 16, 2026
For her part, the director of the UNESCO regional office in the Cuban capital urged "international partners to mobilize flexible, rapid, and sustained financing to ensure that every child and adolescent in Cuba can continue learning safely today and in the months to come." Facing the oil siege imposed by the Trump administration, one of the proposed goals is to ensure that half of Cuban schools have sustainable energy, the senior official indicated.
Finally, in a statement beginning with the header "NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES," related to U.S. sanctions on Cuban nickel, the Toronto-based company announced a reduction of its mining activities in Cuba. "The Corporation has received notification that planned fuel deliveries for Moa will not be fulfilled and the timeline for resumption of deliveries is unknown at this time," reads the statement from Sherritt. This is a new direct blow to the Cuban economy's lifeblood, following the suspension of air operations to and from Cuba by many foreign airlines, with significant relevance in the cases of those based in Canada and Russia due to what both countries mean for Cuba's depressed tourism sector. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has indicated that, for now, the Aztec nation will not send fuel to Cuba. EFE reports having confirmed last Monday the arrival of a tanker with some cargo at the port city of Matanzas; it could be the first since early January.
I will cover this 👇 new political upheaval on the cover of the next issue of my Latin American Report.
Peru's Congress ousted President Jose Jeri four months into his term over undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman, continuing a decade-long cycle of political turmoil https://t.co/PWPxr03Gyr pic.twitter.com/incMa0gYoI
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 18, 2026
This is all for today's report. Source for the cover picture.
