The Latin American Report # 626

After a lengthy investigation phase by the Ministry of the Interior, the Republic of Cuba's Attorney General's Office filed a case in the Supreme People's Court against Alejandro Miguel Gil Fernández, a former vice prime minister and minister of Economy and Planning who fell from grace in February of last year, when he was removed from his executive and political posts and imprisoned under suspicion of corruption. During the entire period between that moment and last Friday night, civil society, including a sector that is organic to the Cuban current political system, demanded transparency for the case, and, in this sense, the statement from the Cuban Public Ministry still leaves, perhaps, more questions than answers.

"Criminal liability was requested for the crimes of espionage, acts detrimental to economic activity or contracting, embezzlement, bribery, forgery of public documents, tax evasion, influence peddling, money laundering, violation of the rules for the protection of classified documents, and the removal and damage of documents or other objects in official custody," reads the official note published in the newspaper Granma, the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba. These are extremely serious charges in themselves, but their subjective connotation is heightened if, as is presumed, that espionage provided intelligence to the United States, the sworn enemy of the Cuban Revolution.

The charge of espionage alone, targeting those who, "to the detriment of State security, [participate], [collaborate] or [maintain] relations with the intelligence services of a foreign state, or [provide] them with reports, or [obtain] or [procure] them for the purpose of communicating them," carries life imprisonment among the sanctions that can be applied, and also the death penalty. The accused's sister, a resident of the Canary Islands, told a Cuban media outlet this Saturday that she had first-hand information indicating that the prosecution is seeking a "life sentence."

The United States has maintained a relentless economic war against Cuba almost since the very triumph of the revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro in 1959, and, in that sense, the possibility that the CIA or some other US agency had a minister of Economy and Planning on its payroll, given the strategic importance of that government portfolio here, is a deeply concerning note. I suspect that Gil Fernández has something to do with information that tends to be very well guarded regarding the financial state of the business sector linked to the Revolutionary Armed Forces, which apparently fell into the hands of Washington somehow.

A network of supposedly independent media outlets and projects—but, in practice, utterly dependent on US government funding—have concentrated their efforts on working this topic in the last years, as is the case with Cuba Siglo 21. The Miami Herald also seems to have had access to confidential information about the finances of GAESA, the economic conglomerate managed by the Cuban Army. We will continue to follow this important development, as demands grow in the national public opinion for the trial against Gil to be transparent and, above all, televised.

Regional news brief

• The tense situation generated in the Caribbean with the US military deployment remains quite complicated to analyze or forecast, following several reports in recent hours alleging that Washington plans to attack military targets within Venezuela. Trump and Rubio, in any case, have denied that possibility.
  

• An attack in the early hours of this Saturday in the town of Benito Juárez, Nuevo León state, Mexico, left three women dead and six men injured. There is no data on the causes behind this new bloody event in the Aztec nation. The State Investigation Agency is analyzing the case as a potential multiple femicide.
  

This is all for today’s report.