How Cuba’s tariffs on U.S.-imported vehicles are bringing millions to the regime despite the embargo
As we see President Donald Trump’s administration taking measures to stop the cashflow to the Venezuelan regime by revoking Chevron Corp.’s oil license, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio reinstating the Cuba Restricted List and restricting visa issuance to Cuban government officials responsible for Cuba’s exploitative labor export programs, reversing Bide-era economic concession, there is one aspect that has raised little attention from U.S. politicians, at least in public.
Since November 2022, the Biden-Harris administration began issuing licenses to private U.S. companies to export “hybrid or combustion vehicles, new and used, of different brands and sizes, with a manufacturing date between 2018 and 2023” to Cuba.
According to figures published by the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, these licenses resulted in over 75 million dollars in vehicle exports to Cuba between 2023 and 2024.
A license exception is a general authorization to export or reexport certain items without a license under stated conditions. The exceptions allowed under Title 15 Section 740.21 Support for the Cuban People (SCP) of the Code of Federal Regulations include “certain exports and reexports to Cuba that are intended to support the Cuban people by improving their living conditions and supporting independent economic activity; strengthening civil society in Cuba; and improving the free flow of information to, from, and among the Cuban people.” These Items should be “for use by the Cuban private sector for private sector economic activities” and should be “sold directly to individuals in Cuba for their personal use or their immediate family’s personal use.”
Whereas the exports authorized by these licenses were supposed to have ‘Cuban private companies’ as recipients, there are very few private citizens in a totalitarian communist regime with a tight grip on economic activities, including so-called Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MIPYMES), who can afford importing cars valued in thousands of dollars, and on top, paying between $20,000 and $56,000 in tariffs per vehicle to the General Customs of the Republic of Cuba, a number that more than triples the exporting agencies’ service fees — according to public statements by Alejandro Canton, director of Maravana Cargo, one of the U.S. based companies with a license to export vehicles.
The range of vehicles exported by the licensed agencies includes: “Microcars, Subcompact and Compact Cars, Medium and Large Size Cars, Luxury Cars of Medium and Large Size, Sports cars, Convertibles, Compact Minivan and Minivan, Mini, Compact, Midsize and Large SUVs, and Pickup Trucks. Among the brands are Ford, Mercedes Benz, Chevrolet, Toyota, BMW, Land Rover, Tesla, Cadillac, and Nissan”.
Yes, you read it right: a fully electric Tesla Cybertruck was recently exported from Miami to Havana, the capital of a country well-known for fuel scarcity, a failed energy infrastructure, and for its people being castigated with day-long blackouts for the last couple of years, while those who have dared to publicly express their discontent due the lack of access to basic electric service since the massive July 11 protests in 2021 have been punished with lengthy prison sentences or forced to flee the country.
The Cuban regime is well known for its use of offshore shell companies to conduct its dealings, to skew U.S. economic sanctions. The exporting companies require money deposits in Cuba, so due to the embargo affecting Cuban banks, payments would have to travel through third countries to reach these U.S. companies. This scheme may also allow and encourage money laundering.
Even if most of these vehicles were indeed reaching private citizens not related to the communist government, it’s still valid to ask:
Which Cubans benefit from these licenses, in a country where the Median salary continues to be the equivalent of 20 to 30 U.S. dollars?
How are these imports strengthening civil society?
Who at the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the U.S. Treasury Department, and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce decided electric and luxury vehicles were such a necessity to the Cuban people that merited exemptions to the embargo?
We can only speculate on who was responsible for recommending Biden, or the OFAC/BIS offices, which companies (over twenty by 2024) were deserving of these licenses — similar to those applied to commodity and food products, that are exported in the hundreds of millions every year from the U.S. into Cuba-, or even convincing his administration of the appropriateness of this policy.
Just one month before the first license was approved, there were high-profile exchanges between Cuban government officials and some of the same US company owners who later received the licenses.
On October 26th, 2022, Cuba’s current ruler, Miguel Díaz-Canel, received a group of American businessmen, to participate in a ‘business conference between Cuba and the U.S.’ This meeting was organized by Cuba’s Chamber of Commerce and U.S.-based consulting group Focus Cuba, led by Phillip Peters, who advises U.S. senators who’ve traveled to Cuba, and Paul Johnson, president of the United States Agriculture Coalition for Cuba. Robert L. Muse, a Washington D.C.-based attorney involved in facilitating license exceptions for Cuba, and lawyer Ralph Patino, a member of the Democratic National Finance Committee who assisted with Obama’s push toward normalcy with the Cuban Government and was a member of the Joe Biden Policy Committee on Caribbean Issues, were also at the event. Amongst the Cuban American attendees were former D. congressman Joe García, and five businessmen, according to official Cuban sources, who were not named, but included Hugo Cancio, who was one of the most influential private figures in shaping Obama’s trade policies towards Cuba and is a frequent donor to Democrats. They were also joined by former U.S. House representative (D) Joe Garcia.
Some of these businessmen met again with Díaz-Canel in New York in September 2023 and traveled to Miami just days later to build excitement for potential dealings with the Cuban regime.
In 2020, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CDA) created a roadmap for the Biden-Harris administration to implement a policy of engagement toward Cuba, which included “expanding support for the non-state sector” of the Cuban economy by “facilitating trade relations, financing, and support from U.S. businesses, universities, and foundations, and promoting increased U.S. commercial engagement with Cuba by proactively providing guidance to U.S. businesses about U.S. and Cuban laws and regulations and providing mechanisms to reassure U.S. businesses wary of U.S. sanctions.” Emily Mendrala, who was the executive director of CDA at the time this document was published, soon after became Biden’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and later in 2023, Deputy Assistant to the President, Advisor on Migration. During her tenure, she took part in regular meetings with high-ranking Cuban regime officials, and with citizens representing the so-called private sector. She also traveled to Cuba for one of these meetings in November 2022.
The first license to export electric vehicles and chargers to the Republic of Cuba nationals was approved on November 17th, 2022, on behalf of Maryland-based Premier Automotive Export, Ltd. owned by John Felder. He reportedly sold the first Tesla legally exported from the US to Cuba to a Cuban American couple based in Maryland who own the restaurant Cuba de Ayer. The shipment was completed by Crowley Liner Services, a company that obtained an OFAC authorization in 2001 to provide regularly scheduled common carrier services for licensed cargo from the United States to the Republic of Cuba.
The second license was granted to Miami, Florida-based Apacargo Express owned by Cuban American Eduardo Aparicio, in April 2023 to export “cars, trucks, trailers, tractors, and agricultural equipment.” The third license was granted in May 2023, to Hugo Cancio’s Miami-based Fuego Enterprises Inc. So far, there have been a total of 22 license exceptions approved.
All these facts have been widely covered in Cuban independent media, almost entirely funded through democracy assistance funds appropriated through Congress, now at risk of disappearing with the potential extinction of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Nationa Endowment for Democracy (NED), tasked with administering those funds. Otherwise, there has not been much attention to these scandalous deals outside Miami’s media ecosystem.
Cuban journalists have recently raised alarms that these cars may even be imported by fugitives from U.S. justice, who have taken refuge in Cuba, where they sometimes associate with high-profile figures from the elites such as Sandro Castro, Fidel’s grandson.
The sightings of these vehicles circulating in the streets against the backdrop of ruined cities are a regular cause of outrage among Cuban people. An Instagram account (@autos_cubaa) regularly shares videos and photos submitted by citizens who ask: Where is the embargo?
Economists have recently argued that due to Cuban government customs restrictions and duties, it had become more profitable for US companies to export vehicles than food and other commodities, for which the US is Cuba’s largest provider, further complicating the country’s humanitarian crisis.
In January 2025, the Cuban regime introduced new regulations to the import of vehicles, designed to favor the state-run import companies that make up the military-run conglomerate GAESA in the business of importing vehicles, and to supposedly make it harder for these private U.S. companies to organize the required paperwork to complete the exports.
The latest figures published by the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council indicate that these imports from the U.S. continued in January of 2025, for a value of almost 2 million dollars.
