The Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz he met with Javier Botín, a Spanish businessman belonging to the well-known banking family, who showed his interest in expanding investments on the Island.
“I had a cordial meeting with Javier Botín, a prestigious Spanish businessman with business in Cuba, who confirmed the interest in expanding investments in our country in mutually beneficial areas, such as tourism, transportation and renewable energies,” the leader indicated this Thursday in his social networks.
The youngest of the children of Emilio Botín-Sanz de Sautuola García de los Ríos, a banker who grew the institution founded by his family, Banco Santander, was in Havana exploring business opportunities with the Cuban regime.
Brother of Ana Botín, who was appointed president of Banco Santander in September 2014 upon the death of her father, Javier manages the advisory firm JB Capital, but has always been very careful with the businesses she undertakes, due to the high public exposure and reputation of his family in the Spanish business and financial world.
However, since the appointment in October 2019 of the governor Miguel Diaz-Canel by the general Raul Castro -brother of the dictator Fidel Castro-, the youngest of the Botín family has been expressing public interest in participating in investments in Cuba.
Owner of a “vacation residence” in Cuba, according to an article in The confidential February 2019, Botín dressed in a white guayabera this Thursday to sit at the negotiation table at the Palace of the Revolution.
The article from the aforementioned media already alerted him: “Javier Botín has had Cuba on his agenda for some time.” Written almost five years ago, the businessman's obsession with Cuba seems constant, but the progress of his projects is at a pace that leaves much to be desired. apparently due to the “legal insecurity” that prevails in the properties of the Cuban regime and its “investment portfolio”.
According to what was published in February 2019 by The confidentialAt that time, Botín had been trying for months to convince “a small number of investors” of the opportunity represented by the “hybrid transition” of the regime that enthroned Díaz-Canel as leader of the so-called “continuity.”
As highlighted by the Spanish media, Botín had and has very much in mind “the experience developed by some Spanish family sagas”, such as the run away, the owners of the hotel chain Melia, considered experts in doing business “despite the sociopolitical context.”
The businessman, who met the deputy prime minister in 2019 Ricardo Cabrisas -visiting Madrid to meet with the Spanish president Pedro Sanchez- He preferred this time, almost five years later, to move to Havana to continue trying to make the investment of his life.
“In the case of Cuba, some of the best businesses are beginning to develop among the children of the generation still in power. "They have the ambition that their parents did not have and the lack of political idealism that their elders displayed," he highlighted. The confidential in 2019.
Sitting at the table with the leadership of the Cuban totalitarian regime, with the winds in favor of the new government formed by the socialist Sánchez, the youngest of the Botín will return to the fray to try to take a piece of Cuba's cake, the one that the "heirs" of the dictatorial power of the Castro family are putting up for sale.
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