Category: Dossier Cuba 21 English

GAESA—the real power in Cuba—has driven the country into the worst financial crisis in its history. Behind the façade of socialism, a military oligarchy controls more than 70% of the economy and 95% of the nation’s financial system, while the civilian government operates as little more than a puppet. Miguel Díaz-Canel has no control over the country’s finances.

Cuba’s interventionist policy is not a thing of the past. It is an active reality in the present, despite the colossal social and economic disaster that Cuba is currently experiencing.

The Cuban state has become a mafia-like actor operating at the heart of a transnational criminal network. The Cartel de los Soles was born and grew under this Cuban guidance. Cuba’s contribution to regional organized crime has been its strategic, military, and ideological advice in the creation and consolidation of the Cartel of the Suns, a drug trafficking organization that emerged in Venezuela.

The Cuban Observatory of Citizen Auditing (OCAC) documented 1,319 verified crimes between January and June 2025, almost five times more than in the same period in 2023 and more than all that happened throughout 2024. This represents an average of 7.3 crimes per day, evidencing an unprecedented escalation in crime and a diversification of criminal types.

To feed a Cuban with the basics, at least 30,000 pesos per month are needed.  This explains why most Cubans can barely manage two meals a day and, in many cases, cannot even include protein in their diet. One Cuban Pesos equals 0.04 cents of US Dollars.

Who really controls ETECSA? Where are its multi-million dollar revenues? Why is it not accountable either to the State or to the people? These questions are not limited to one company but point directly to the business apparatus that controls it: GAESA, the military-controlled conglomerate that manages 70% of the economy and 95% of the country’s foreign currency finances.

The 11J was not only a conjunctural event, but the detonator of a social movement that forced families to cross the threshold between private life and public activism. Their struggle has highlighted the systematic use of the judicial apparatus as a tool for political punishment and has exposed the social control strategies implemented by the regime.

Cuba has before it the opportunity to break out of its oppression and stagnation. There is no need for another “deal” fabricated by the power elite to maintain its control over the country and Cuban society. The road map the Act outlines in its Title II contains basic demands for freedoms and democracy that are popular in Cuba today. All that remains to be done is to follow it.

The power elite and its government are not only surrounded by sanctions, the Helms Burton Act, its Title III, financial sanctions, and the consequences of being a bad payer. They are hemmed in -first and foremost- by their own incompetence, by their political clumsiness in resisting change, even though it knows that its model does not work. The island is currently in the eye of a devastating financial, political and social hurricane.

While the government tries to minimize the importance of the amount of crimes committed, the fact is that criminal acts continue to increase, an increase of 50.72% in comparison to 2023. 

Remittances, the government’s main source of foreign currency income, fell 43% in 2024 compared to the previous year and 70% compared to 2019.

With fragile governability, high levels of social discontent and a massive exodus of one million Cubans in the last three years, the change of regimen in Cuba is possible in 2025.