Coinciding with the anniversary of the islandwide July 11 uprising in 2021 on Friday, the United States sanctioned Cuba’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, for his involvement in “gross violations of human rights, ” the Department of State said in a statement.

This is the first time the U.S. government has imposed sanctions on Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s handpicked president and head of the Communist Party, a civilian figure who was spared in several rounds of sanctions on Cuban officials both under President Donald Trump, in his first term, and President Joe Biden.

The State Department also sanctioned Cuban Defense Minister Álvaro López Miera, and Interior Minister Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas. The sanctions mean the three, along with their immediate family members, will be prohibited from traveling to the United States.

Their public designation was made using a section of the State Department’s budget appropriations act for fiscal year 2025, which states that foreign government officials who have been involved in significant cases of corruption or a violation of human rights are not “eligible” to enter the United States.

“The United States will never forget the tenacity of the Cuban people four years ago as they demanded freedom and a future free from tyranny,” a senior State Department official told the Miami Herald. “The Trump Administration remains firm in its commitment to holding the Cuban regime accountable for its repressive actions and rampant acts of corruption.”

In addition, the State Department is imposing visa restrictions on several unnamed “Cuban judicial and prison officials responsible for, or complicit in, the unjust detention and torture of July 2021 protestors.” Because those sanctions are imposed under a different authority provided by immigration laws, which establish confidentiality on visa matters, the administration cannot publicly identify those targeted.

The State Department is also adding 11 hotels to its Cuba restriction list and its Cuba Prohibited Accommodations List, which include companies and properties linked to the Cuban government and the military conglomerate GAESA. Among those newly banned are luxury hotels recently built in Havana, like “Torre K.”

In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the State Department invoked a similar authority under the budget act to impose visa sanctions on Raúl Castro, the island’s ultimate ruler, and his sons and daughters. Still, Díaz-Canel is the sitting president, and the sanctions likely mean he won´t be attending the United Nations’ General Assembly, which he has done on a couple of occasions, in 2018 and 2023, accompanied by his wife, Luis Cuesta. Díaz-Canel’s term will end in 2028.

General López Miera, the head of Cuba’s Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, was already unable to travel to the United States because in 2021 President Joe Biden added him to a list of “specially designated nationals” for his role in the “mass detentions and sham trials” that followed the July 11 demonstrations, Biden said.

Days before leaving office in January 2021, President Trump had also sanctioned Álvarez Casas under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and added him to the designated nationals list.

The July 11 anti-government demonstrations were met with a crackdown ordered by Díaz-Canel on state television that day. Justicia 11J, a group that has tracked political detentions in Cuba, has documented at least 1,586 arrests linked to the uprising. Many of those arrested were given decades-long sentences in summary trials.

By December last year, 553 protesters were still in prison, according to Justicia 11J. Other organizations estimate a higher number. As part of a deal brokered by the Vatican and the Biden administration, Díaz-Canel committed to releasing 553 “prisoners,” the exact figure used by the Justicia 11J; however, Cuban authorities ultimately released only 212.

Since then, Cuban authorities rounded up some of the same people released under the deal, including well-known dissidents like José Daniel Ferrer, Félix Navarro and Donaida Pérez Paseiro.

On Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on X that “the Cuban regime continues to torture pro-democracy activist José Daniel Ferrer. The United States demands immediate proof of life and the release of all political prisoners.”

Still in prison are Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, a prominent dissident artist, and Maykel Gonzalez, a Grammy-award-winning rapper and activist. Several women remain behind bars for protesting against the government that day, including Lisandra Góngora, a mother of five, sentenced to 14 years in prison, and María Cristina Garrido, a poet, activist and mother of three, sentenced to seven years.

Worsening prison conditions

Conditions in Cuban prisons have grown worse in recent years. The Cuban Prison Documentation Center, an independent organization based in Mexico, said that at least 24 people died in the prison system in the first six months of this year. The group documented 45 complaints of beatings and physical torture and 104 cases of denial of medical care in 43 prisons in the country. Lack of food and medications and unsanitary living conditions are also common, the group said.

Yan Carlos González, a man who staged a 40-day hunger strike in prison protesting charges of sabotage that carried a 20-year sentence, died earlier this week, according to activists and Cubalex, a group providing legal help to people in Cuba. The group said González had been accused of burning a sugarcane field with no evidence. He died in a local hospital in Santa Clara, in central Cuba.

A Human Rights Watch report published Friday also documented the accounts of 17 people who were detained in connection with the July 11 protests, claiming abuses suffered in prison.

The interviewees described physical abuse by prison guards and said they were subjected to stress positions such as “the bicycle” or “wheelbarrow,” in which prisoners “are forced to run, handcuffed, with their arms raised above their heads,” the report says.

A former detainee held in the Boniato prison in Santiago de Cuba said he was beaten and put in solitary confinement several times for making requests to guards. During one incident in 2022, “they brought me down in handcuffs using a hold they call ‘the bicycle,’ and they beat me with a hose all over my body,” the former prisoner recalled, according to the report.

“If your family isn’t bringing you food, you die,” one of the interviewees told Human Rights Watch. “The food they gave you was inedible. It had worms in it,” said another. They also reported outbreaks of scabies, tuberculosis, dengue fever and COVID-19, which they said were left untreated. They said prison officials regularly ignored medical concerns.

In a virtual meeting with relatives of imprisoned protesters, human rights activists and independent journalists at the U.S. embassy in Havana on Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called for the release of all political prisoners. In a video message, Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised those invited for opposing “a regime that does everything possible to punish you and your families.”

Last month, a Cuban diplomat said at a United Nations meeting debating the “Nelson Mandela Rules” — a set of minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners — that in Cuban prisons “the rights of persons deprived of liberty are guaranteed,” and that “there is no overcrowding, violence against women, unsanitary conditions or discrimination.”

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