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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba (MINREX) announced on Tuesday the passing of Alejandro González Galiano, a Cuban diplomat who died in Havana in the afternoon, at the age of 65, according to the official statement published by the Cuban Foreign Ministry.
MINREX did not disclose the cause of death. At the time of his passing, González Galiano was working in the office of the Vice President of the Republic of Cuba, Salvador Valdés Mesa.
González Galiano began his diplomatic career in 1984, after graduating from the Raúl Roa García Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI), joining the MINREX in the Sub-Saharan Africa Directorate.
Over more than four decades of service, he carried out permanent missions as an official in the Republic of Cape Verde and the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
He achieved the rank of ambassador in two strategically significant destinations for Havana: the Republic of Argentina and the Kingdom of Spain, one of the European countries with the strongest historical and cultural ties to Cuba.
In the internal sphere, he held the positions of Director of the Department of Dissemination and Information, General Director of Press, Communication, and Image, and Deputy Minister of Foreign Relations from 2009 to 2013, a period that coincided with the transfer of power from Fidel to Raúl Castro and the initial steps towards a budding international openness.
In 2010, he received the "Enrique Hart" Medal for his 25 years of service, an honor awarded by the National Union of Public Administration Workers of Cuba.
The MINREX extended its condolences to the family, colleagues, and friends of the diplomat, with special mention of his son, also named Alejandro, who is an executive at the Ministry itself.
The passing of González Galiano is part of a series of deaths among high-ranking Cuban diplomatic officials in recent years. In April 2025, former Deputy Minister Abelardo Moreno Fernández passed away, who served at MINREX for over five decades. In February 2024, former ambassador Félix Andrés León Carballo died under unclear circumstances, who had joined MINREX in 1975. In July of that same year, another former Cuban diplomat died in a traffic accident.
The pattern reflects the aging of the generation of diplomats trained during the 1980s, officials who upheld the foreign policy of the Cuban regime for decades and are now fading away without a visible renewal of that structure.
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