The Biden administration has announced new sanctions against Cuba's national revolutionary police and its top two officials as the US looks to increase pressure on the communist government following this month's protests on the island.
The Police Nacional Revolcionaria and the agency's director and deputy director, Oscar Callejas Valcarce and Eddie Sierra Arias, were targeted in the latest sanctions announced on Friday by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The police are part of Cuba's interior ministry, which was already the subject of a blanket designation by the Trump administration back in January.
"We hear the cries of freedom coming from the island. The United States is taking concerted action to bolster the cause of the Cuban people," President Joe Biden said at the start of a White House meeting with Cuban Americans not long after Treasury announced the sanctions.
The administration says it is considering a wide range of additional options in response to the protests, including providing internet access to Cubans, and has created a working group to review US remittance policy to ensure that more of the money that Cuban Americans send home makes it directly into the hands of their families without the government taking a cut. Biden added that more sanctions were in the offing.
The White House meeting comes almost three weeks after unusual July 11 protests in which thousands of Cubans took to the streets in Havana and other cities to protest shortages, power outages and government policies. They were the first such protests since the 1990s.
The Cuban regime deployed the PNR to attack protesters, the Treasury Department said in a statement.
The police were photographed confronting and arresting protesters in Havana, including members of the Movement of July 11 Mothers, a group founded to organise families of the imprisoned and disappeared, according to Treasury.
"The Treasury Department will continue to designate and call out by name those who facilitate the Cuban regime's involvement in serious human rights abuse," said Andrea Gacki, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
"Today's action serves to further hold accountable those responsible for suppressing the Cuban people's calls for freedom and respect for human rights."
White House officials said Biden would discuss the new sanctions as well as ways to potentially establish internet access for the Cuban people.
Last week, the U.S. government announced sanctions against the minister of the Cuban armed forces, Alvaro Lopez Miera, and the Special Brigade of the Ministry of the Interior - known as the "black berets" - for having participated in the arrest of protesters.
Australian Associated Press
