MINNEAPOLIS — Minneapolis has elected two black transgender representatives to its City Council, adding to what advocacy groups have described as a banner election for transgender people in public office.

Andrea Jenkins easily won the race Tuesday night for an open seat in south Minneapolis, with roughly 73 percent of the vote. Jenkins, a 56-year-old poet and historian who transitioned in her 30s, spent years as a policy aide to two previous council members in the same ward.

Phillipe Cunningham’s victory took longer because of Minneapolis’ instant-runoff voting system. But by Wednesday afternoon, the city announced Cunningham — a 29-year old transgender man who had worked in the mayor’s office — had unseated the seat’s longtime incumbent and current council president, Barb Johnson.

Neither candidate made their gender identity a focal point of their campaigns. But Jenkins said their victories will “encourage young transgender people to keep on fighting, to keep on living, because we can be active and productive members of our community.”

Their victories came as transgender candidates made history elsewhere, too. Danica Roem became the nation’s first openly transgender state lawmaker by winning a Virginia Statehouse seat. Roem, a transgender woman, soundly defeated Bob Marshall, a longtime Republican delegate who sponsored legislation that would have restricted transgender bathroom use and who called himself the state’s “chief homophobe.”

US tightens travel rules to Cuba, blacklists businesses

WASHINGTON — Americans seeking to visit Cuba must navigate a complicated maze of travel, commerce and financial restrictions unveiled Wednesday by the Trump administration, part of a new policy to further isolate the island’s communist government.

Now off-limits to U.S. citizens are dozens of Cuban hotels, shops, tour companies and other businesses included on a lengthy American blacklist of entities that have links to Cuba’s military, intelligence or security services. And most Americans will once again be required to travel as part of heavily regulated, organized tour groups run by U.S. companies, rather than voyaging to Cuba on their own.

The stricter rules mark a return to the tougher U.S. stance toward Cuba that existed before former President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro restored diplomatic relations in 2015. They come as President Donald Trump tries to show he’s taking action to prevent U.S. dollars from helping prop up the Cuban government.