On February 3, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control informed Starwood Hotels, which owns the Sheraton, it was in violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act and the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 by allowing this meeting to take place. These laws prohibit U.S. companies and their overseas subsidiaries from providing any facilities or other services to Cuban individuals or companies. Hotel management then told the 16 Cubans officials participating in the meeting to leave and sent their room deposits for their three-night stay to the Treasury Department.

The meeting, organized by the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association, included representatives from ExxonMobil, the Valero Energy Corporation, and Caterpillar. It reportedly continued at another hotel in the city not owned by a U.S. company.

Cuban and Mexican government officials protested Washington’s action. “There does not exist and neither should there exist the extraterritorial application of this law in our nation,” Mexican foreign minister Luis Ernesto Derbez told the media. An editorial in the February 6 online edition of the Cuban daily Granma condemned this further extension of “the criminal U.S. economic war on Cuba…to the detriment of the sovereignty and laws of other countries.”

Responding to these public statements, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice told a Congressional panel February 16 that “dislocations” caused by Washington’s economic sanctions against Cuba would be “looked at.”  
 
 
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