Hotel chains are walking away from resort properties. Credit card networks have gone dark. A Canadian mining company that spent three decades extracting nickel in eastern Cuba has pulled its workers out. One by one, foreign firms are cutting ties with Cuba after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that turned the island's military conglomerate into a sanctions tripwire, and the fallout is accelerating.

Executive Order 14404, signed May 1, authorizes sanctions on foreign companies operating in key sectors of the Cuban economy tied to Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., the military-controlled holding company known as GAESA. The order also exposes foreign banks that process significant transactions with sanctioned parties to U.S. secondary sanctions, a provision that has created what amounts to a foreign investment vacuum on an island already reeling from fuel shortages, hourslong blackouts, and a collapsing currency.

The State Department says GAESA controls 40 percent or more of Cuba's economy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, called GAESA "the heart of Cuba's kleptocratic communist system." The executive order takes direct aim at that heart, and the companies that have been feeding it.

Credit cards cut off, hotels emptied

Cuba's central bank announced June 3 that Visa and Mastercard transactions on the island would be suspended starting June 6. The cause: a foreign bank that processes payments for Financiera Cimex S.A., a GAESA-owned remittance company, ended its relationship with the Cuban entity. The bank's name has not been disclosed, but the effect was immediate. Cubans and visitors who relied on international card networks lost access overnight.

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control had set a June 5 wind-down window before secondary sanctions exposure took effect. That deadline passed. And with it, the last buffer between foreign firms and real legal risk evaporated.

Spanish hotel chains Meliá and Iberostar each said they would stop managing roughly a dozen Cuban hotels, citing the regulatory environment and collapsing tourist demand. Royalton has ceased operations entirely. These are not small players. They represent the backbone of Cuba's tourism infrastructure, an industry the regime has long depended on for hard currency.

The broader pressure campaign against Cuba's communist regime has been building for months, but the corporate exodus triggered by Executive Order 14404 marks a qualitative shift. Foreign firms aren't just grumbling about compliance costs. They're leaving.

Sherritt International: three decades, then the door

No company illustrates the speed of the unraveling better than Sherritt International, the Toronto-based miner that for more than three decades has operated the Moa nickel-and-cobalt project in eastern Cuba through a joint venture with the Cuban state.

After the May 1 order, Sherritt suspended operations and repatriated its staff. On May 7, the State Department formally designated the Moa Nickel S.A. joint venture. Sherritt briefly moved to dissolve its Cuban joint ventures altogether, then reversed course.

On May 20, the company announced a nonbinding agreement to sell a 55 percent controlling stake to Gillon Capital LLC, the Texas-based family office of Ray Washburne. Washburne is a Republican fundraiser and former president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation during Trump's first term. The State and Treasury departments told Sherritt they do not object to talks involving the nonbinding agreement, though any final deal would require their approval.

Sherritt's shares have fallen more than 50 percent amid the turmoil, The Wall Street Journal reported. A company that once bet its future on Cuban nickel now finds itself scrambling to sell at a steep discount to a buyer with political connections, and even that deal needs Washington's blessing.

The indictment of Raúl Castro

The sanctions campaign is not the only front. On May 20, the same day Sherritt announced its potential sale, the Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment charging Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz, 94, and five co-defendants with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder over the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue civilian planes that killed four people.

The indictment carries no realistic prospect of a courtroom trial. Castro is elderly and in Cuba. But the legal action sends a signal the administration clearly intends: the United States is not simply tightening trade rules. It is treating the Cuban regime's past conduct as an active enforcement matter.

That signal matters in context. The administration's willingness to use sanctions and executive power to reshape foreign policy extends well beyond Cuba. The pattern, executive order, agency designation, secondary sanctions, corporate compliance pressure, has become a template. And in Cuba's case, it is working faster than many observers expected.

An economy already on its knees

The corporate retreat lands on an island that was already in crisis. As of June 7, the informal-market peso was trading near 620 to the dollar. Fuel shortages and hourslong blackouts have become routine. Tourism, once the regime's most reliable revenue stream, was already declining before the hotel chains walked away.

Now the financial plumbing itself is broken. Without Visa and Mastercard processing, remittances and tourist spending face new friction. The loss of Financiera Cimex's banking relationship means the GAESA-owned remittance pipeline has been severed at a critical node.

For ordinary Cubans, the consequences are severe and immediate. The regime's defenders will blame Washington. But the architecture that made Cuba so vulnerable, a military conglomerate controlling nearly half the economy, funneling revenue to regime elites while the population endures blackouts and shortages, was not built by the United States. It was built by GAESA.

Executive Order 14404 simply made that architecture a liability for anyone doing business with it. The foreign firms did the math and chose to leave.

What comes next

Several open questions remain. The Sherritt-Gillon Capital deal is nonbinding and still requires final approval from both the State and Treasury departments. Whether Washburne's political ties smooth or complicate that process is unclear. The identity of the foreign bank that cut ties with Financiera Cimex has not been disclosed, and it is unknown whether other financial institutions will follow suit or find workarounds.

The administration has shown it is willing to use executive authority aggressively to restructure federal priorities, and Cuba policy is no exception. The combination of Executive Order 14404, the OFAC wind-down deadline, the State Department designation of Moa Nickel, and the Castro indictment amounts to a coordinated pressure campaign executed across multiple agencies within a matter of weeks.

The results are visible. Hotels emptied. Card networks shut down. A mining company that survived three decades of prior sanctions regimes folded in days. The informal peso cratered.

Critics of the approach will argue the sanctions hurt ordinary Cubans more than the regime. That argument deserves an honest answer, but it also deserves an honest question in return: Who built the system that made Cuba's entire economy dependent on a single military conglomerate? And who profited from it?

The administration has faced legal resistance on other fronts, but on Cuba, the executive order has encountered no judicial roadblock. The sanctions are in effect. The wind-down window has closed. And the foreign firms that once treated GAESA as a cost of doing business have decided the cost is now too high.

For decades, the Cuban regime sold access to its economy while its people went without power, food, and freedom. Now the buyers are gone, and the regime is left holding the bill.