Washington adds Cuba’s oil buyers and Raúl Castro’s grandson to the SDN list

The State Department on 3 September designated five Cuban entities and one individual under Executive Order 14404. The list includes Empresa Importadora de Abastecimiento para el Petróleo, known as ABAPET, and Comercial CUPET S.A., both tied to the state oil company Unión Cuba-Petróleo, which itself was listed on 11 June. A grandson of Raúl Castro was named in the same tranche. Banking and mining names rounded out the five.

ABAPET exists to buy equipment, spare parts and tools for CUPET. Comercial CUPET was designated for operating in Cuba’s energy sector. Those are the exact grounds written into EO 14404, signed on 1 May: anyone operating in energy, defence, metals and mining, financial services or security on the island can be blocked, and so can anyone acting for a person already blocked.

Since May the United States has run nine tranches and tagged 80 parties, 72 of them new to the Specially Designated Nationals list. President Miguel Díaz-Canel and relatives went on the list in June. So did the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, ports, banks, the steelworks, the tourism ministry and CUPET. Thursday’s round is not a new policy. It is another turn of the same wheel, aimed at the shops that keep the power stations running after the oil itself was squeezed.

The squeeze started earlier. Executive Order 14380, signed on 29 January, authorised tariffs on third countries that send oil to Cuba. Venezuela’s shipments stopped after the January raid that took Nicolás Maduro into US custody. Mexico paused its own cargoes. Cuba’s grid, already fragile, lost the two suppliers that had covered most of its import need. Blackouts followed. The September listings try to make it harder to buy the pumps, valves and software that would keep remaining plants online.

Havana calls the campaign a blockade. Washington calls it a push to end what it describes as the Cuban state’s work against the United States in the hemisphere. Neither phrase changes the mechanics. An SDN listing freezes any property in the US financial system and threatens secondary risk for a non-US bank that handles the named firm’s trades. For an island that pays for fuel and parts in scarce foreign exchange, that risk is the point.

The energy crisis on the island will get worse before any political concession appears. That is the design. It is also the humanitarian cost that aid groups have been logging all year. Thursday’s notice does not mention blackouts. It names the procurement company that buys the parts. The two sentences belong to the same policy.