CUBA has accused the United States of being “dishonest and mendacious” as Washington intensified its brutal sanctions regime against Cuban companies.

Havana hit back after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the latest round of punitive measures would target five Cuban entities.

Specifically, the new sanctions target financial firm Rafin and the International Financial Bank, along with logistics company Universal Stores, as all three institutions maintain relations with previously sanctioned business group Gaesa.

The other two targets are state-run business Geominera and the Jose Marti Steel Enterprise.

In a clear sign that Washington’s attention has shifted to Cuba after its humiliating strategic defeat by Iran, Mr Rubio took to social media to rant that the situation on the socialist island is “devolving” as the government continues to “prioritise its own total control over the freedom, opportunity and basic wellbeing of the Cuban people.” 

Mr Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, accused Havana of using Gaesa to “steal the island’s few resources, diverting them for repression, anti-American subversion.”

But Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez condemned the sanctions, branding Mr Rubio “dishonest and mendacious.”

Writing on social media, he said: “Cuba has proven stronger, more capable and more effective than he anticipated in the face of the ruthless aggression and collective punishment inflicted upon its people and their living conditions.

“What this individual is promoting from the world’s greatest power is a crime.”

Cuba’s United Nations ambassador Ernesto Soberon Guzman accused Mr Rubio of directing “a chorus of lies” featuring Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, and Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar.

“No government, no rational person — and certainly not the people of Cuba who suffer from the economic impact of the US economic war — can believe that the intensification of the blockade, the energy siege and the rest of the most recent sanctions are aimed at supporting the Cuban people,” Mr Soberon said in a statement.

The US blockade has caused severe power cuts and food and water shortages across the island.

In late January, US President Donald Trump threatened tariffs against any country that sells or provides oil to the Cuba, which depended heavily on oil shipments from Venezuela until they were halted after the illegal and unprovoked US attack on that country.

Some 100 people were killed in that act of aggression by US forces, which also kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Celia Flores. Both are still languishing in a New York detention centre.