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The Cuban economist and essayist Miguel Alejandro Hayes warned that dismantling GAESA would not be enough to dismantle the regime's economic power, and he directly challenged the narrative that positions the military conglomerate as the core of the Cuban problem and the main target of democratic transformation.
Hayes participated last Wednesday, June 4, in the program A Esta Hora from Actualidad Radio, hosted by Yoly Cuello, where he analyzed the schemes of corruption and the power structures that support the dictatorship.
One of the most significant points was their rejection of the figure of 18 billion dollars that is circulating as the alleged capital accumulated by GAESA.
"To say that GAESA has 18 billion dollars stored in a bank account is completely absurd and incorrect. This cannot be sustained from either an economic or financial perspective. It simply makes no sense at all," he stated.
The economist explained that this figure comes from an alleged leak endorsed by a single specialist: "Nobody has proven that from a technical standpoint. The academic and economic community in Cuba, the vast majority, did not consider it credible at the time," he pointed out.
Hayes argued that the logic of Castro's corruption does not work by accumulating funds in its own institutional accounts.
"All the money that Raúl Castro and his entourage are going to steal will not be deposited as working capital in the bank accounts of their own companies. That scheme of corruption makes no sense. It is completely absurd," he said.
According to the analyst, "the money stolen by the Castro family and their entourage is in the form of personal funds under the names of frontmen, in properties, and in businesses they have built; they haven’t created a piggy bank to store all the millions they have been stealing."
Hayes also warned about the regime's ability to evade sanctions through simple formal restructurings, and he recalled a specific case: when the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned FINCIMEX, a GAESA company linked to remittances, "the Cuban regime created Orbit S.A. in less than 24 hours, a company that was physically located next to FINCIMEX."
That background supports his central thesis: "The Cuban regime could formally dissolve GAESA as an economic and repressive institution tomorrow, and at the same time, it will create something parallel that fulfills exactly the same function, because GAESA is nothing more than an institutionalization of the authoritarian mechanism of the Cuban economy."
The economist also drew attention to the so-called Cuban private sector and its connection with GAESA: this sector generates around 2.5 billion dollars annually that the conglomerate used to earn.
"It is impossible that in the repressive authoritarian context with the State security community that Cuba has, there has been a billion-dollar loss of foreign currency in GAESA to a presumed, hypothetical private sector, and that this is not something consensual and coordinated," he warned.
For Hayes, focusing exclusively on GAESA amounts to an "economic reformism" that does not address the root of the problem.
"As a Cuban, and even as an economist, I am not interested in the dismantling of GAESA. What concerns me is the dismantling of the regime," he stated.
The analyst emphasized that the conglomerate has served as the central power of the Cuban economy for less than 20 years, and that prior to its existence, the regime already controlled foreign currency arbitrarily.
"What needs to be dismantled are the repressive, economic, and political apparatuses of the Cuban regime, that is, what enables its growth. GAESA hasn't even always been there," he concluded.
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