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The official media outlet Cubadebate published an extensive analysis this Tuesday, labeling the media attention received by the Business Administration Group S.A. (GAESA) on social networks during May and June 2026 as a «opportunistic digital campaign».
In a new attempt by the regime to defend the military conglomerate against the sanctions from Washington, the so-called 'Media Observatory of Cubadebate' claims that the digital conversation around GAESA is neither organic nor spontaneous, but rather a "political operation activated from Washington" and amplified by a concentrated media ecosystem in the United States and Florida.
The analysis comes amid an unprecedented escalation of pressure from the Trump administration against the conglomerate. On May 1, Trump signed Executive Order 14404, which imposed sanctions on actors within the Cuban state apparatus and opened the door to secondary sanctions against foreign companies operating with GAESA.
On May 7, Marco Rubio announced the first designations: GAESA, its leadership, Brigadier General Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera, and Moa Nickel S.A. were blocked.
The deadline of June 5 for foreign companies to sever ties with GAESA or face secondary sanctions triggered the departure of several companies from Cuba and intensified the crisis of the conglomerate.
The article from Cubadebate is the third piece of a "damage control" strategy by the regime.
On June 2, Granma published a defense of GAESA rebranding it as "GAE" —removing the initials "S.A."— in an effort to clean up the conglomerate's image. On the same day, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla publicly defended its "proven efficiency".
The analysis by Cubadebate covers 4,008 publications on X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok between January 1, 2025, and June 14, 2026, and concludes that 63.6% of all that content was produced only in May and June of 2026, coinciding with the sanctions and Rubio's video message from May 20.
According to the text, "the leap does not result from a gradual evolution of the debate, but from a political operation that seeks to turn GAESA into a singular symbol of all the problems in Cuba and, from there, justify new economic, diplomatic, and eventually coercive pressures from the United States."
The document includes this media outlet among those it categorizes as "directly or indirectly funded by U.S. federal funds," alongside Martí Noticias, Cubanet, and Cubanos por el Mundo. This accusation is false, as has been pointed out several times.
The regime is also attempting to discredit the video from May 20 in which Rubio stated that GAESA controls 70% of the Cuban economy and has $18 billion in assets, and promised a "new relationship" with a "New Cuba" contingent upon free elections and less military control over the economy.
Cubadebate states that "the campaign against GAESA operates as a communicational extension of the maximum pressure policy: first a pretext is manufactured, then the sanction is justified, and finally the idea that more coercion against Cuba would be legitimate is normalized."
What the regime's analysis overlooks is that GAESA is the business arm of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, created in the 1990s to generate foreign currency, and that it operates with total opacity and without public transparency, controlling strategic sectors such as tourism, foreign currency commerce, remittances, logistics, and banking, behind the backs of the Cuban people.
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