One day after he announced a new round of sanctions on Cuba, targeting “enablers” of the Cuban government’s arms imports and foreign military cooperation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Axios on Aug. 7 that Cuba will never escape the “noose” of tightening sanctions, no matter how hard it tries to evade them.
Bragging about the United States’ ability to kill many more Cubans, Rubio warned, “every time they create a new mechanism in which they try to get out of the noose, we just close it off. They certainly can’t wait us out. Certainly this isn’t going to go away for the next 2½ years...What we’re trying to teach them is that there are no escape valves…we’re in no rush.” In Rubio’s sick mind, Washington will be “patient and persistent,” while Cuban men, women and children starve to death. He was quick to announce that more sanctions are coming.
As a result of previous sanctions that threatened any foreign companies that do business with Cuba with secondary sanctions, there are now 7,000 large containers of urgently needed goods that Cuba purchased that remain stranded at ports throughout the Caribbean. Shipping companies that had been transporting the containers simply abandoned them at any Caribbean port as arriving at a Cuban port would automatically trigger sanctions.
