The journalist and analyst Jorge de Armas from Hypermedia Magazine maintains that the recent sanctions by the U.S. Department of State against Miguel Díaz-Canel, his family, and Alejandro Castro Espín operate on two distinct levels: one symbolic, aimed at appeasing the Cuban exile community, and another pragmatic, which preserves channels of dialogue with potential interlocutors of the regime.
"I have the thesis that there are two worlds being managed here. One world is the real world, which is the world moving towards a possible transition, the world where we must determine whom to engage with and whom not to. And there is another world that is closely related to the historical yearnings of a segment of the Cuban exile, which also needs to be addressed," De Armas stated in an interview with CiberCuba.
On June 4th, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Díaz-Canel, his wife Lis Cuesta Peraza, his stepson Manuel Anido Cuesta, Alejandro Castro Espín, and his son Raúl Alejandro Castro Calis to the list of specially designated nationals.
Entities such as MINFAR, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, AMISTUR Cuba S.A., and Minera La Victoria S.A. were also sanctioned.
But in the opinion of the Armas analyst, the concrete impact of these measures on the Cuban economy is minimal.
"There is a group of sanctions that are practically unfeasible. In an economy as destroyed as the Cuban one, in a system as cancerous as the Cuban system, sanctioning certain entities truly has no impact on an economy that is already impoverished," he noted.
As an example, De Armas points to the sanction against Minera La Victoria, a Cuban-Australian joint venture that led Antilles Gold to suspend its listing on the Australian stock exchange last Thursday: "There is no Cuban mining industry. We are sanctioning a mining industry that practically does not operate, except for the ecological disaster they were causing in Moa."
For De Armas, the effect on the population is equally negligible: "Sanctioning Raúl Castro's son does not change anything for the average Cuban. The average Cuban will continue to experience power outages, will remain without food, without water, and without hope."
The most revealing aspect of his analysis is what the sanctions deliberately omit. Washington did not include Chancellor Bruno Rodríguez nor the Cuban diplomatic corps nor the deputy ministers.
"The Cuban diplomatic corps is not sanctioned, Bruno Rodríguez is not sanctioned, the deputy ministers are not sanctioned because they are the ones in charge; they also need a way to access these individuals," he explained.
This reading is reinforced by another concrete fact: the head of Southern Command, General Francis L. Donovan, met on May 29 with Cuban General Roberto Legrá Sotolongo in the vicinity of the Guantánamo naval base. Legrá Sotolongo has been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2021 for his role in the repression of July 11, which illustrates the gap between the rhetoric of sanctions and actual diplomatic practice.
The sanctions of June 4 are the third round under Executive Order 14404, signed by Donald Trump on May 1, 2026, which introduced secondary sanctions against foreign actors doing business with GAESA.
Since January 2026, the Trump administration would have accumulated more than 240 measures against Cuba, although De Armas concludes that, symbolically, these actions respond more to U.S. domestic politics than to a transformative strategy for the island.
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