The United States has expanded a visa restriction policy to target Cuban officials believed to be tied to a labor program that sends Cuban workers overseas, particularly health care workers, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday.

Cuba's health service generates major export earnings by sending doctors and health workers around the world.

In a statement, Rubio said the expanded restrictions target individuals and immediate family members of individuals believed to be responsible for the program, which he described as "forced labor." The U.S. has already imposed restrictions on several people, including some Venezuelans, he added.

Cuba's foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, lashed out at the restrictions, calling the measure part of Rubio's "personal agenda" and unjustified.

"Suspension of visas associated with Cuba's international medical cooperation agreements represents the seventh measure of unjustified aggression against our population in a month," Rodriguez said on X.

The decision to restrict visas for those involved with Cuban medical missions is the latest significant escalation in U.S. policy toward Cuba since Trump took office on Jan. 20.

Rubio has signaled a tough new stance on the communist-run island, reversing a last-minute effort by the Biden administration to loosen sanctions on long-time foe Cuba and complicating money transfers to the island. Rubio, a former U.S. senator and the son of immigrants who came to Florida from Cuba in the 1950s, has long opposed more normal relations with Havana, dating back to the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama.

Rubio on Tuesday branded the labor programs as self-serving and abusive.

"Cuba's labor export programs, which include the medical missions, enrich the Cuban regime, and in the case of Cuba's overseas medical missions, deprive ordinary Cubans of the medical care they desperately need in their home country," Rubio said.

Cuba has for decades rejected such accusations.

Since its 1959 leftist revolution, Cuba has dispatched an "army of white coats" to disaster sites and disease outbreaks around the world in the name of solidarity. In the last decade, they have fought cholera in Haiti and Ebola in West Africa.

But Cuba has also exported doctors on more routine missions in exchange for cash or goods in recent decades, an increasingly critical source of hard currency in a nation suffering a deep economic crisis.

The United States and Cuba have had a strained relationship since Fidel Castro took over in the 1959 revolution, and a U.S. trade embargo has been in place for decades.

Reuters

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