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Washington Begins Sanctioning Investors and Companies That Attempt to Hide the Assets of the Cuban Oligarchic Conglomerate
August 3, 2026 -The most recent sanctions from the U.S. Department of the Treasury mark a shift in strategy regarding economic pressure on the Cuban regime. For the first time, Washington is not only targeting GAESA directly—the business conglomerate controlled by the new oligarchy centered around the Castro family—but also foreign investors, funds, and companies that attempt to act as intermediaries to conceal, transfer, or protect its assets. This not only affects its current operations but also complicates any future attempts at privatization under corrupt assumptions.
That is the main finding of a new report prepared by Emilio Morales, vice president of Cuba Siglo 21 and president of Havana Consulting Group, who argues that the new U.S. policy seeks to close the last remaining avenues that allowed GAESA to evade international sanctions.
For Morales, the significance of these measures goes beyond the immediate reduction in revenue. The sanctions aim to prevent the regime from reorganizing its assets through shell companies, new partners, or alternative corporate structures.
According to the report, this new phase of sanctions is already beginning to produce visible effects. Foreign partners who for decades did business with the Castro-led oligarchic conglomerate are abandoning the Cuban market, while other potential investors now face a growing risk of being sanctioned if they participate in transactions intended to benefit GAESA.
Tourism is feeling the most visible and immediate impact
The tourism sector appears to be the area where the impact of the new measures is most clearly reflected.
For more than three decades, GAESA turned tourism into one of its main sources of foreign exchange through Gaviota and other state-owned companies associated with international hotel chains. However, in recent months, major operators such as Meliá, Iberostar, Barceló, and Blue Diamond have announced their withdrawal or a drastic reduction in their operations in Cuba.
The report particularly highlights Meliá’s withdrawal after 36 years on the island, describing it as the end of a partnership that began during the crisis of the so-called Special Period following the collapse of the USSR and as a symbol of the deterioration of the tourism model built around GAESA.
The figures confirm the collapse
The study supports this analysis with data illustrating the magnitude of the crisis in the sector.
Between January and May 2026, Cuba received just 359,491 international tourists—58.45% fewer than during the same period in 2025 and 82.74% fewer than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. In May alone, 30,883 visitors arrived, more than 90% below the figure for the same month in 2019.
Hotel occupancy also continues to decline. After reaching 23% in March 2025, it fell to 18.9% in March 2026 and barely reached 12.9% in May. The report states that international tourism has practically ceased to be the sector’s mainstay and that a significant portion of current travelers are Cubans living abroad who are traveling for family reasons or to transport aid, remittances, and medications.
CEIBA: The Case That Changes the Rules
The dossier identifies the sanctions against CEIBA Investments Limited as the clearest example of the new U.S. approach.
According to the author, GAESA reportedly attempted to protect part of its real estate assets by formally transferring companies such as Inmobiliaria Monte Barreto—owner of the Miramar Trade Center—to CEIBA. However, the Treasury Department ultimately sanctioned the investment fund as well, sending an unequivocal signal: any entity that helps conceal assets belonging to the Castro-led oligarchic conglomerate may become a target of future measures.
Following the sanctions, several CEIBA executives resigned, and the fund announced its delisting from the London Stock Exchange—developments that the report interprets as evidence of the high financial and reputational cost of maintaining ties with GAESA.
Internal Crisis and External Pressure
The report notes that the sanctions now coincide with an unprecedented economic crisis marked by power outages, shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, the deterioration of transportation infrastructure, and a steady decline in the country’s appeal as a tourist destination—even before the sanctions were tightened—due to various internal and external factors.
Taken together, the author argues, these two factors reinforce each other. While the systemic crisis was already eroding Cuba’s competitiveness as an investment and tourism destination, the new sanctions make it more difficult to attract partners and limit GAESA’s ability to restructure its finances.
The report further argues that this tightening of sanctions hinders any attempt to sell hotels or other strategic assets prior to a potential political transition.
Another conclusion of the dossier is that Washington has moved beyond a policy focused exclusively on sanctioning state-owned enterprises. The new strategy consists of targeting the entire financial and corporate support network that enables the conglomerate controlled by the Castro oligarchy to retain its assets or access new sources of financing.
If this approach continues, the study concludes, GAESA’s international room to maneuver will continue to shrink, increasing its economic isolation and limiting its ability to sustain the extractive economic model it imposed on the island.
