Six Cubans and five state companies went onto the American sanctions list on Thursday, two of the people at addresses in Moscow and Beijing, and a guidance answer issued the same hour tells food and medicine suppliers they are not the target
Two of the six people added to the American sanctions list on Thursday are recorded at addresses outside Cuba. One is in Moscow. One is in Beijing.
Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated six Cuban nationals and five Cuban state entities under Executive Order 14404, and published the whole action on its recent actions page under the heading Cuba-related Designations. Monica Milian Gomez, born in Havana in 1963, is listed at an address in Moscow. Waldo Perez Cortes, born in 1964, is listed at an address in Beijing. The notice gives no role, no employer and no explanation for either.
The five companies
The entities are the more legible half of the action.
Union de Industria Militar, the Union of Military Industries, is recorded on the list as a state-owned enterprise established in 1988 whose organisation type is defence activities. It is the umbrella. Beneath it in the same action sits Empresa Militar Industrial Yuri Gagarin, established in 1966 and typed as maintenance and repair of motor vehicles. The other three are traders: Tecnotex, established in 1983, Technoimport, established in 1995, both typed as wholesale of other machinery and equipment, and Sociedad Mercantil Duna, a much younger company established in November 2022 and typed as non-specialised wholesale trade.
One of the six individuals, Heriberto Sanchez Alleyne of Havana, carries a linkage on his entry to Technoimport.
What the order allows, and what the notice withholds
The authority is an order signed on 1 May and published on 7 May.
Executive Order 14404 lets the Secretary of State or the Secretary of the Treasury block any foreign person determined to operate in the energy, defence and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services or security sector of the Cuban economy, or in any other sector Treasury later names. It also reaches anyone determined to have provided goods, services or material support to a party already blocked under it. That second limb is why the designation of a trading house matters more than the designation of a factory: it puts the trading house's counterparties inside the test.
The notice itself says none of this. It records determinations and prints entries. There is no finding, no reason and no statement about what anybody did.
The same action carried a carve-out
OFAC published a new guidance answer, numbered 1264, alongside the designations.
It addresses non-American persons sending food, medicine or medical devices to Cuba, and states that the United States government does not intend to target them under this order for those transactions. The posture is written to survive contact with the list: it applies, in the document's own terms, to humanitarian transactions that involve a person designated under the order, or an entity such a person owns half or more of. Agricultural commodities, medicine and medical devices are then defined by cross-reference to the Agricultural Trade Act of 1978 and to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act rather than left to argument. The answer also records that as of August 2026 the government is working to operationalise 100 million dollars of humanitarian assistance delivered through independent organisations.
Two old entries moved
The last part of the action is bookkeeping, and one line of it is a correction.
Roberto Legra Sotolongo and Alvaro Lopez Miera were both already blocked under the Global Magnitsky programme. Both now carry the Cuba order's tag as well, so each rests on two authorities rather than one. The notice prints each entry twice, before and after, and on Legra Sotolongo the two versions differ by more than the tag: his date of birth changes from 1955 to 5 June 1954, and a Cuban passport is added. The document does not say why.
