President Donald Trump has signed an executive order dramatically expanding the United States’ sanctions regime against Cuba, authorising Washington to penalise not only Cuban officials but any foreign company or financial institution that does business with the island. The decree, issued on Friday and taking immediate effect, targets the most strategic sectors of Cuba’s stricken economy — energy, defence, mining, and financial services — and empowers the State Department and Treasury to blacklist third-country actors deemed to support Havana. Viewed from Washington, the move is framed as a response to what the White House describes as an ‘extraordinary threat’ to American national security, though the timing — coinciding with Cuba’s enormous May Day rallies — suggests a deliberate provocation.

In Havana, the government condemned the new measures as ‘collective punishment’, with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez dismissing them as unilateral coercion aimed at suffocating the Cuban people. The May Day procession outside the US embassy drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators vowing to ‘defend the homeland’, even as Trump told an audience in Florida that the United States would be ‘taking over’ the Caribbean island ‘almost immediately’. Analysts in London note that the sanctions build on restrictions imposed earlier this year, following the ousting of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and signal that Cuba remains a core target of the administration even as it confronts crises in Iran and elsewhere.

For international businesses — particularly those based in China and Europe — the order introduces significant legal and financial risks. Any entity involved in Cuba’s energy or mining sectors, or facilitating transactions that bypass existing sanctions, now faces asset freezes and potential prosecution. The decree explicitly extends liability to foreign banks that process payments for the Cuban government, a step that could chill investment from Moscow to Madrid.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has placed the island on alert for a possible American military strike, while the Communist Party maintains its grip through a mix of patriotic mobilisation and economic desperation. The embargo, in place since 1962, has been tightened repeatedly over the past decade, but this latest escalation — with its extraterritorial reach — breaks new ground. Whether it achieves the administration’s stated goal of regime change or simply deepens the humanitarian crisis remains an open question, though the rhetoric of annexation suggests Washington is prepared to push further than it has in decades.

Cuba’s allies in Beijing and Brussels are watching warily, calculating how much economic pain they can absorb before their own interests are imperilled.