The official Cuban newspaper Granma published an article this Tuesday titled "Cuba, the GAE and the United States: Anatomy of a State Calumny," in which the regime publicly defended the business-military conglomerate GAESA for the first time and rebranded it as GAE (Business Management Group), removing the "S.A." (Limited Company) from its name.
The publication arrived approximately a month after the Trump administration sanctioned GAESA on May 7, under Executive Order 14404 signed by Trump on May 1, and after Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the conglomerate controls assets worth between 18 billion and 20 billion dollars that are not subject to public audit.
The Cuban writer Carlos Aguilera, residing in Prague, analyzed in CiberCuba the article from Granma alongside journalist Tania Costa and described it as "very symptomatic." "They are trying to gloss over reality, as they often do in all their victim narratives."
For Aguilera, the name change is a public relations maneuver comparable to the historical linguistic manipulation of the regime. "Just as those who rose up in the Escambray were not rebels but bandits, now Gaesa is not Gaesa but the GAE, a business group. Because they know that Gaesa is an acronym that is highly discredited," pointed out Tania Costa.
Aguilera also pointed out that Granma's own statement reveals the true nature of the conglomerate: "It is a military group that operates like a paramilitary group, and they openly acknowledge this in their statements. In other words, it functions parallel to the State, informing the State about some of the things it does."
The writer went further in describing who truly controls the country. "What they are saying is that, let’s see, this country operates, but it doesn’t operate because of the Cuban state. It operates because of other elements, other groups, which are the ones that really make things happen here, so to speak."
Tania Costa provided a compelling comparison regarding the housing figures that Granma presented as GAESA's achievement in 30 years: the Spanish region of Murcia, with only 1.6 million inhabitants, completed 11,888 homes in the year 2000. "What the Region of Murcia accomplished in one year, GAESA did in 30," she stated.
The journalist also pointed out the lack of any mention of hospitals in Granma's statement, despite the fact that the funds from medical missions were supposed to be allocated to that sector. "If Gaesa admits that in 30 years, from the Special Period until now, it has only built 10,000 homes in Cuba, then where did the money go?"
The Granma statement describes the conglomerate as an entity made up of "thousands of men and women who have been discreet guardians of the country's resources for the past 30 years," a phrase that Aguilera compared to the rhetoric of State Security. For him, GAESA has never been subjected to any kind of state oversight, something that the Granma text implicitly acknowledges.
Aguilera summarized the essence of the conglomerate with a straightforward statement: "Gaesa is a way of collecting money that only goes into a safe controlled by the Castro family, Raúl Castro or perhaps two or three others, but that is all it is."
Tania Costa concluded her analysis with a statement that echoes the sentiment of many Cubans: "If that’s all they have to show for 30 years, it fits into a paragraph of a news article in Granma, we have been cheated."
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