US sanctions Cuban president, ‘regime-controlled’ luxury hotels

Al Jazeera :

The US State Department has imposed sanctions on senior Cuban officials, including President Miguel Diaz-Canel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced as he marked the fourth anniversary of a brutal crackdown on historic antigovernment protests.
In a post on X, Rubio said the State Department would be “restricting visas for Cuban regime figureheads”, including President Diaz-Canel, Defence Minister Alvaro Lopez Miera, Interior Minister Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas, and their “cronies” for their “role in the Cuban regime’s brutality toward the Cuban people”.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, also announced that the State Department has added the Torre K hotel to its restricted list of entities in order to “prevent US dollars from funding the Cuban regime’s repression”.
The Cuban government has promoted the luxury high-rise Torre K in central Havana as a symbol of modernisation. But the government has faced criticism for its large investment in luxury hotels amid a severe economic crisis in the nominally socialist one-party state.
“While the Cuban people suffer shortages of food, water, medicine, and electricity, the regime lavishes money on its insiders,” Rubio said.
Ten other “regime-linked properties” were also added to the State Department’s List of Prohibited Accommodations, it said in a statement.
The statement said the sanctions were being enacted in “solidarity with the Cuban people and the island’s political prisoners”, citing the Cuban government’s brutal crackdown on the July 2021 demonstrations – the largest since the Cuban revolution in the 1950s.
The police crackdown resulted in one death and dozens of wounded protesters.