A crack appears in Cuba’s dictatorship
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Bank accounts belonging to a company owned by Cuba’s armed forces are bulging with billions of dollars, the Miami Herald reported last week. But that’s hardly news.
The communist military dictatorship has long fattened its inner circle at the expense of ordinary Cubans while blaming the U.S. for the island’s poverty. Repression doesn’t come cheap, but Cuba always seems to have what it needs to keep the lid on popular discontent.
What’s really newsworthy about the Herald’s report is where it came from: a leak. According to Herald journalist Nora Gámez Torres, the military’s huge conglomerate, Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. or GAESA, keeps its “financial information secret and even guards its accounts from government comptrollers." But thanks to a “rare leak" of “internal financial records" to the Herald, we now know that hundreds of millions of dollars earned by companies on the island that should go to public services end up in the accounts of GAESA or its subsidiaries.
The leak to the Herald suggests there are cracks inside the system. It may be that there are players who don’t think they’re getting a big enough piece of the action. More likely, the Cuban status quo, in which dire privation dominates daily life, has become too foul even for some members of the ruling elite.
There’s also this: The military may own GAESA on paper, but the Castro family and its allies are widely believed to be the company’s beneficiaries. Greedy rich Cubans treat GAESA as their property. Until his death in 2022, Raúl Castro’s former son-in-law, Luis Alberto López-Calleja, ran GAESA.
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