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The phrase was brief, but hardly casual.
When Jeremy P. Lewin, acting Under Secretary of State and one of Marco Rubio's top advisors, stated that “the regime must return these resources to the Cuban people”, he was not merely relying on a rhetorical device against the Havana regime.
The statement introduces a much more delicate concept: the possibility that the United States and its allies may begin to discuss not only sanctioning GAESA, but also recovering and eventually redistributing assets linked to the Cuban military conglomerate.
That nuance changes the political scope of the debate.
For years, Washington has portrayed the sanctions against GAESA as an economic pressure tool against the military apparatus that controls a large part of the Cuban economy.
However, the new measures announced under Executive Order 14404 appear to go further: they explicitly target foreign assets, international bank accounts, and foreign financial entities linked to the conglomerate.
The difference is enormous. It is not just about restricting future businesses, but rather about putting under scrutiny the wealth accumulated over decades.
And there appears the big question: what does "returning resources to the Cuban people" actually mean?
The phrase allows for several interpretations. The most superficial would be to understand it as a political slogan aimed at denouncing the contrast between the island's economic crisis and the wealth amassed by the military elite.
But there is another, much deeper interpretation: that Washington may be starting to construct a narrative of asset restitution associated with a potential transition scenario in Cuba.
Such language does not typically appear by chance in U.S. diplomacy.
In international law, there is a significant difference between sanctioning, freezing, confiscating, and restoring assets.
The sanctions aim to punish or apply pressure. The freezing prevents the movement of funds. The seizure involves the transfer of legal control. But the restitution introduces a distinct political element: the idea that these resources legitimately belong to a population and not to the structure that manages them.
That is precisely what Lewin seems to hint at when he talks about "returning" resources to the Cuban people.
The formulation reminds one of processes observed in other contemporary political transitions. After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the international community froze tens of billions of dollars linked to the regime.
In Iraq, after Saddam Hussein, some of the recovered assets were used to support administrative structures and reconstruction programs under international oversight.
In Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, numerous governments initiated processes—often incomplete—for the recovery of assets and properties associated with the communist elites.
The fundamental difference is that Cuba is not officially in a post-transition stage. The regime remains in power. Precisely for this reason, Lewin's statement is so significant: it introduces a discourse typically associated with the "day after" while the political system is still intact.
Washington seems to be sending several simultaneous messages.
One is directed at the Cuban military leadership: GAESA's external assets are no longer viewed simply as ordinary state property, but as resources possibly acquired through an opaque structure and concentrated beyond the reach of the population.
Another message targets banks, shipping companies, and foreign enterprises. The secondary sanctions announced by the Trump administration aim to increase the cost of maintaining financial relationships with the Cuban military conglomerate.
The aim does not appear to be limited to financially suffocating GAESA, but also to map and isolate its international financial network.
But there is a third message, probably the most important: the White House might be starting to publicly consider the financial framework for a future Cuban transition.
This hypothesis would explain why the narrative is no longer solely focused on pressuring and punishing, but rather on recovering and eventually redistributing.
In that scenario, GAESA's international assets could become the subject of litigation, freezing, or international fiduciary management mechanisms.
It would not be a simple process. International experience shows that recovering fortunes linked to authoritarian regimes can take years and involve complex legal battles across multiple jurisdictions.
Furthermore, an even more delicate question would arise: who would decide what "the Cuban people" really means?
A future transitional government? An international mechanism supervised by multilateral organizations? The United States and its allies? Cuban institutions reorganized after a potential political change?
History shows that recovering assets is much easier than legitimately managing them afterward.
There would also be the problem of internal stability. Many contemporary transition processes included negotiation formulas with military or bureaucratic sectors to avoid violent collapses. In several countries, state funds or recovered assets ended up being used to finance retirements, demobilizations, police reforms, and institutional reconstruction.
This opens another, even more complex debate: if one day the assets of GAESA were actually recovered, could they be used to fund new Cuban institutions, compensations for victims of repression, or even retirement programs for sectors of the state apparatus not directly linked to serious human rights violations?
For now, none of this has been officially put forward. But Lewin's statement explicitly introduces an idea that until recently seemed unthinkable: that the money accumulated by the Cuban military conglomerate could someday become the center of an international discussion about restitution, transition, and national reconstruction.
The true significance of the statement may not solely lie in the sanctions announced this week, but in what they politically seem to anticipate: that Washington is increasingly discussing the “day after” GAESA.
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