The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Banco Exterior de Cuba, the state's foreign-trade bank, on 3 September, along with Comercial Cupet S.A. in fuel wholesale, Nicarotec in mining services, Abapet in petroleum equipment imports and Cexni in nickel trade, plus one named individual, Fidel Ernesto Castro Calis, born 16 May 19951. Comercial Cupet is a separate legal person from CUPET, the state oil company designated in June. The same notice issued General Licence 4A, refining the carve-out that lets third-country embassies in Cuba keep transacting2.
OFAC's own entry says only that Castro Calis is "Linked To" Alejandro Castro Espín, which is the standard cross-reference tag the agency applies to any associate. The State Department's press statement the same day goes further and calls him a grandson of Raúl Castro3. That family claim is Washington's characterisation. Lowdown has no independent confirmation of it and does not report it as established.
The 3 September names close a sequence that has worked outward from where Cuban money is kept to where goods are made, and then to whoever sells them. Banks and ports came first between May and July, the arms industry on 6 August, construction and the nickel monopoly on 20 August, and now the intermediaries that move nickel out and fuel in. President Miguel Díaz-Canel was designated personally on 4 June. In practice a Cuban nickel cargo now has no state trading house a foreign buyer can safely pay through, which is a harder constraint than blocking the mine itself.
Banco Exterior de Cuba finances Cuban foreign trade, so its designation reaches the credit behind imports rather than any single cargo. A buyer that wanted to keep trading would need a bank outside the blocked structure and a counterparty that is not on the list, and this notice removes one of each on the same day. Havana's answer, repeated since June, is that measures of this kind reach Cubans on state wages rather than the leadership.
