Category: Dossier Cuba 21 English

The new Treasury Department sanctions have significantly weakened GAESA’s financial and operational capacity by affecting not only the conglomerate itself but also those who attempt to act as its intermediaries; while the Cuban economy itself continues to lose its ability to sustain the tourism sector.

Cuba has hardened the Compulsory Military Service: it has reinforced the system’s coercive nature, tightened penalties against those who attempt to avoid it, and maintained an opaque system that has been the subject of numerous allegations of abuse, negligence, and the deaths of conscripts.

A nonviolent and purely Cuban solution has become impossible in the face of the ruling elite’s intransigence, In that context, making external intervention essential to prevent the nation’s physical demise.

The study by the Cuban Observatory of Citizen Auditing (OCAC) identifies a 115.11% increase in criminal activity in 2025 compared to 2024, and a 336.58% increase compared to 2023

The Cuban government is lying about the extent of the healthcare collapse in Cuba. The death toll would reach at least 8,700 fatalities. This shows that the state has lied again (as it did with the Covid epidemic) by claiming that only 47 deaths had occurred by mid-December. The reality is, at a minimum, 185 times greater.

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.