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A report by the Spanish journalist Isabel Durán published in El Debate reveals the irregularities in the implementation of the so-called Grandchildren's Law in Cuba, where over 350,000 Cubans have initiated the process to obtain Spanish nationality - one in every seven applications worldwide - while all the necessary documentation remains under the absolute control of the regime.
The text reports that the Spanish consulate in Havana signed a contract worth 1,131,295 euros with Grupo PALCO on January 1, 2025, which is the state monopoly authorized by the regime to supply personnel to the foreign diplomatic corps on the Island, aiming to incorporate 88 workers to expedite the backlog of pending cases.
The Association of Descendants of Spaniards Worldwide (ADEM), led by lawyer Estela Marina Pérez Cabrera, has denounced this contract and asserts that the ultimate beneficiary is GAESA, the Cuban military conglomerate that controls between 40% and 70% of the Island's economy without public accounts or audits.
It is important to remember that the United States sanctioned GAESA on May 7, 2026, describing it as "the heart of the kleptocratic communist system" in Cuba, with opaque assets estimated at up to 20 billion dollars.
The reported mechanism is as follows: to prove their Spanish ancestry, a Cuban applicant needs birth, marriage, or death certificates that come from civil and parish registries under the control of the Cuban state, without the possibility of independent verification from Spain.
The situation is worsened by the fact that Cuba is not a signatory to the Hague Convention, meaning its documents do not carry an apostille, but rather a proprietary stamp issued arbitrarily by the dictatorship, making it impossible to verify the authenticity of the records of the 350,000 applicants outside the regime.
Many of these applicants, according to the report, report stalled cases and irregularities in the processing, a situation that Pérez Cabrera has described as a "Kafkaesque labyrinth of endless waits."
"The Sánchez government is paying a company from the dictatorship to impose its own consulate staff to expedite the inclusion of new citizens from the Law of Grandchildren into the electoral roll. In other words, for a Cuban to prove their descent from a Spaniard, Spain ends up paying the state-run company that holds the key to the applicants' presumed Spanish identity. In other words, the document that opens the door to Europe goes through the regime's coffers," the journalist explains.
And it concludes: "Cuba thus meets two conditions that turn it into the true sinkhole for the hundreds of thousands of votes sought by Pedro Sánchez to manipulate the electoral roll to his advantage and rapidly change Spain forever: a gigantic universe of alleged descendants and documentation that is impossible to verify without the support of the dictatorship."
The leader of the right-wing party VOX, Santiago Abascal, reacted to the report with a post on Facebook where he stated: "Only in Cuba will Sánchez's mafia gain access to hundreds of thousands of votes controlled by Castroism. Only in Cuba! Sánchez is preparing the final blow to remain in power."
However, Abascal's post triggered a massive response from Cubans who outright rejected that premise.
"I am Cuban and obtained my Spanish nationality through the law of grandchildren, and if Sánchez thinks that out of gratitude we will vote for him, he is wrong; we do not want a socialist Spain, we want a free and prosperous one," one wrote.
Another internet user was more direct: "I am a Cuban under the grandchild law, and I won't vote for the PSOE; you have to be quite foolish to escape a system only to come back and vote for it."
Some nuanced Abascal's position without abandoning their rejection of socialism: "I assure you that no Cuban would ever vote for the left in Spain. I myself voted for the PP in Andalusia, and I didn't vote for you (VOX) precisely because of these silly and unbelievable comments... We fled from a communist left dictatorship."
The synthesis of the majority sentiment was expressed by another commentator: "There is a greater likelihood that Spaniards will vote for Sánchez than Cubans. Those who flee Cuba do so because of socialism. Moving to another country to vote for what ruined our lives, our homeland, simply makes no sense. We vote based on our experience."
The General Council of Spanish Citizens Abroad warned in October 2024 that, at the current processing pace, it could take up to 20 years to resolve all the cases accumulated globally.
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