The Daily Fuckup

The Trump administration has tightened the screws on Cuba again, this time with a two-step move that widens the sanctions threat and then adds named targets. On May 1, the White House issued an executive order on Cuba under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and declared that the government’s policies remain an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. AP later reported that on May 7, the administration announced additional sanctions, including against the military-run conglomerate GAESA and the joint venture Moa Nickel.

The May 1 order is broad in the ways sanctions orders usually are, but it is still specific about who can be hit. It allows property to be blocked for foreign persons determined to operate in covered sectors of the Cuban economy, to be owned or controlled by the Cuban government or a blocked person, to materially assist the government or a blocked person, or to be responsible for serious human rights abuse or corruption related to Cuba. It also reaches financial services and other transactions that support covered activity. In other words, this is not just about a small list of officials. It is a wider compliance threat for banks, firms, and intermediaries that do business with Cuban state-connected entities. ([whitehouse.gov](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/05/imposing-sanctions-on-those-responsible-for-repression-in-cuba-and-for-threats-to-united-states-national-security-and-foreign-policy/))

AP’s reporting on the May 7 designations shows how that authority can be used in practice. GAESA is the military-controlled conglomerate that sits deep inside Cuba’s economy, and Moa Nickel is a Cuban joint venture that had been operating with Canada’s Sherritt International. AP reported that the sanctions were expected to make foreign companies, insurers, and banks more cautious about any Cuba exposure. That is leverage, but it is also the point: the administration is trying to make ordinary commercial links with the island feel expensive and risky. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/fe68b795495c84760a392db2affc10b9))

What the White House has not done is lay out a clear theory for how all of that pressure turns into a different political outcome in Havana. The official order says the target is repression, corruption, and threats to U.S. interests. That is the justification. It is not the same thing as an endgame. Sanctions can freeze assets, disrupt deals, and scare off outside partners, but they do not automatically produce concessions, much less durable change. ([whitehouse.gov](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/05/imposing-sanctions-on-those-responsible-for-repression-in-cuba-and-for-threats-to-united-states-national-security-and-foreign-policy/))

That leaves the Cuba policy looking like a sharper version of an old playbook: raise the cost of doing business, widen the risk zone, and assume the other side eventually bends. The May 1 order and the May 7 designations may do exactly what they are designed to do on paper — isolate regime-linked actors and complicate foreign business on the island. But the administration still has not shown where the policy is supposed to stop, what success would look like, or why this round of pressure should produce a result decades of pressure never did.