Cuba says Trump’s fresh sanctions on its economy amount to ‘collective punishment’

Cuba’s government has said new sanctions imposed on the island by Donald Trump amounted to “collective punishment”, as an enormous 1 May procession outside the American embassy in Havana vowed to “defend the homeland”.In an executive order on Friday, the US president said he would impose sanctions on people involved in broad sections of the Cuban economy, as he seeks to put more pressure on Havana after ousting Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, earlier this year.The latest sanctions constituted “collective punishment” of the nation’s people, said Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez. “We firmly reject the recent unilateral coercive measures adopted by the #UnitedStates government,” he posted on X in English.Trump has mused about taking over Cuba, which lies 145km from Florida and has been under a nearly continuous US trade embargo since Fidel Castro led a communist revolution in 1959.On Friday, Trump used a speech in Florida to again suggest the US could launch operations against Cuba.“On the way back from Iran, we’ll have one of our big – maybe the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the biggest in the world, we’ll have that come in, stop about 100 yards offshore and they’ll say, ‘Thank you very much. We give up.’”The