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Marco Rubio Warns Banks Moving Money in Cuba, “Should Freeze Activities Immediately”

by in Daily Edition | June 23, 2026 3 min read

Sec. Marco Rubio

Secretary Marco Rubio (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley), The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

President Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday issued a warning regarding the Cuban military-controlled conglomerate GAESA, which he said serves as “the main vector for regime elites to steal the island’s few resources, diverting them for repression, anti-American subversion and spying instead of schools, power plants, and basic necessities for the Cuban people.”

[NOTE: GAESA (the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.), which is owned and operated by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, is estimated to control between 40-70% of the Cuban economy including hotels, gas stations, supermarkets, and Cuba’s largest banks, including Banco Financiero Internacional.]

Rubio, who grew up in Miami with Cuban-born parents, warned: “Today, I designated additional GAESA network entities associated with moving both its money and its physical assets, as well as entities responsible for exploiting Cuba’s mineral and metal reserves for ill-gotten profit. Anyone providing services to these sanctioned actors is at risk of being sanctioned themselves. Foreign banks and other companies that provide services to these entities should freeze those activities immediately.”

MAGA-aligned Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), who was born in Cuba in 1954, replied to Rubio: “Thank you, @SecRubio! The regime in #Cuba is a national security threat to the United States and must be relegated to the ash heap of history. President Trump’s & your leadership have been key to pressuring the regime more than ever before. Cuba is next!”

[NOTE: In January, in an executive order, President Trump asserted that the government of Cuba was a national security threat to the United States. He wrote: “The regime aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the Government of the Russian Federation (Russia), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.”]

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla has said it is “absurd” for the Trump administration to claim that Cuba poses a threat to the United States: “It is absurd for the State Department to claim that Cuba, a developing country, relatively small and subjected to a brutal economic war, could pose a threat to the world’s greatest military, technological, and economic power.”