Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera, the brigadier general who took the reins of Cuba's largest business conglomerate following the death of Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, was sanctioned this Thursday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio along with GAESA itself and the mining company Moa Nickel S.A., under the executive order signed by President Donald Trump on May 1.
Lastres Morera assumed the executive presidency of the Business Management Group of the FAR (GAESA) on an interim basis following the death of Major General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja on July 1, 2022, former son-in-law of Raúl Castro and architect of the conglomerate for 26 years, and was officially confirmed in the position in February 2023.
Born on August 19, 1962, in Marianao, Havana, Lastres Morera graduated with a Gold Medal from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Havana, earning a degree in Economic Planning, and developed her entire career within the Ministry of Revolutionary Armed Forces (MINFAR).
Her rise was gradual: she passed through the Directorate of Economic Cooperation and Material Fund, the Minister's Secretariat, the V Section as a first officer, the Deputy Head of the Special Economic Section, and the Second Head of the V Department, until she became the First Executive Vice President of GAESA before assuming the presidency.
She has been a representative in the National Assembly of People's Power since 2018, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba since 2021, and was appointed to the Council of State on July 17, 2024.
Rubio described GAESA as "the heart of the kleptocratic communist system of Cuba" and pointed out that the conglomerate controls between 40% and 70% of the formal Cuban economy, including tourism, foreign currency trade, remittances, and banking.
A leak of 22 internal financial documents revealed that GAESA managed up to 18 billion dollars in current assets as of March 2024, operating with complete opacity and with its own parallel tax office, the OATFAR, exempt from the national system.
The family background of Lastres Morera has sparked additional controversy: his sister Adys arrived in the United States in January 2023 and manages real estate businesses in Florida, while his daughter Any Rodríguez Lastres lives in Panama and works in the international port sector after starting her career at the Mariel Container Terminal.
Journalistic investigations also reveal that Lastres Morera owns 75% of the shares of Allicom Limited, a company registered in the United Kingdom, and is listed as the owner of apartments in Panama.
"Put the name in Google and companies, records, links appear. Here we are talking about where the money stolen from the Cuban people is hidden," said Luis Domínguez, a researcher at the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba.
The predecessor of Lastres Morera, Rodríguez López-Calleja, had already been sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in September 2020 for directing a conglomerate that, according to Washington, financed repression in Cuba and interference in Venezuela.
The sanctions imposed this Thursday are part of a maximum pressure campaign that, since January 2026, has accumulated more than 240 sanctions against the regime, intercepted at least seven tankers, and reduced the island's energy imports by between 80% and 90%.
Rubio warned that "additional appointments can be expected in the coming days and weeks."
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