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The Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel visited the Military Industrial Company "Granma" this Monday, located in the municipality of Regla, in Havana, in what the regime presented as a "work tour" under the title "The Philosophy of Doing Well."
According to the page Presidencia Cuba, the visit was accompanied by two of the most powerful men in the regime's military apparatus: the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), Army Corps General Álvaro López Miera, and the Minister of the Interior, Army Corps General Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas, both members of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba.
The company's director, Fleet Captain Lázaro Raúl Hernández Gómez, explained that its corporate purpose is "the maintenance, restoration, and assurance of the combat readiness of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Navy."
However, what that military company is actually producing today reveals the depth of the Cuban collapse: charcoal stoves, sawdust, and firewood that are being distributed across the island due to the lack of gas and electricity, water tanks, fuel tanks, and household utensils.
The entity has 19 production units and 686 workers, and according to its director, it met the sales plan for 2025.
Among its lines of work are the manufacturing of floating docks, the modernization of fishing vessels, and the repair of electric motors ranging from five to 500 kilowatts.
The director particularly emphasized "the repair of the electric motors of the Chinese locomotives, which were previously repaired abroad and are now repaired within our Company."
The visit comes at a time when Cuba is facing an unprecedented economic crisis: the GDP has fallen by a cumulative 23% since 2019, power outages reach up to 20 hours a day, and more than nine million Cubans are cooking under precarious conditions using firewood and charcoal.
That a company whose formal purpose is to maintain the combat capability of the FAR has to manufacture wood stoves to distribute to the population illustrates how far the civil production collapse has reached on the island.
The "Granma" Military Industrial Enterprise is part of the network of companies linked to GAESA, the military conglomerate that controls about 40% of the Cuban economy without public accountability.
The Minister of the Armed Forces, who accompanied Díaz-Canel during the visit, Álvaro López Miera, has been sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury since July 2021 for his role in the repression of the protests on July 11 of that year.
The regime's official media justified the visit by stating that "it has been a tradition for the leadership of the country to tour military industrial enterprises," describing them as spaces that "uphold a philosophy of intelligent resistance, the value of which is heightened, particularly now, given the demands of a society in urgent need of effective governance."
While the regime celebrates that a military factory produces wood stoves, 80% of Cubans believe that the current crisis is worse than the Special Period of the 1990s, according to data from March 2026.
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