Caribbean & Central America - June 2026

The US administration led by President Donald Trump continues to ramp up its maximum pressure campaign on Cuba, aimed at forcing political and economic change, recently indicting Cuba’s former president Raúl Castro (2008-2018) over the deadly shootdown of two planes in 1996. At the time of writing on 26 May this had yet to translate into US military action akin to that which occurred in Venezuela in January, where US charges against former president Nicolás Maduro (2013-2026) were used to justify his abduction and arrest. The indictment comes as Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (Gaesa), the opaque state-owned military conglomerate that Castro founded in the 1990s, was also targeted last month by the US, whose US Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified it as a key barrier to change in Cuba.

In an address to the Cuban people on 20 May, the same day that Castro was indicted, Rubio mentioned Gaesa no less than eight times, saying: “Today Cuba is not controlled by any ‘revolution’; Cuba is controlled by Gaesa”. Describing the conglomerate as “a state within the state that is accountable to no one and hoards the profits from its businesses for the benefit of a small elite”, Rubio went on to say that “President Trump is offering a new relationship between the US and Cuba. But it must be directly with you, the Cuban people, not with Gaesa”, which he said “has revenues three times greater than your current government’s budget” with “US$18bn in assets” and which controls “70% of Cuba’s economy” – claims which have been met with scepticism from some experts.

Less than two weeks earlier, on 7 May, Gaesa and its executive president, General Ania Lastres Morera, were designated by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac) in the latest round of sanctions ordered by Trump on 1 May [EB-26-05]. With Gaesa, which Ofac said was responsible for 40% of Cuban GDP, first blacklisted in December 2020 by the first Trump administration (2017-2021), the latest designations introduce broader secondary sanctions for foreign firms and banks who partner with it. In a further sign of increasing pressure on the conglomerate, on 21 May US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrest of Lastres Morera’s sister, Adys Lastres Morera, who it said had entered the US as a “lawful permanent resident” in January 2023. ICE said she would be removed and her lawful permanent resident status revoked as “her presence violates the Immigration and Nationality Act”, citing the link to her sister.

A sprawling enterprise

Created by then-defence minister Raúl Castro in the 1990s, during the ‘Special Period’ (when Cuba suffered severe hardship after the collapse of the Soviet Union), its initial objective was to strengthen the armed forces through taking control of companies linked to tourism, foreign trade and other sectors which captured foreign currency.

Over time this evolved into what BBC Mundo described in a 22 May report as “a literal economic empire” – a process which gathered pace following its absorption of the largest state enterprise Corporación Cimex S.A. (Cimex), which is involved in various sectors, including the import and export of goods. BBC Mundo cited Emilio Morales, the president of Miami-based Havana Consulting Group, as saying that with its takeover of Cimex, which reportedly occurred in 2010, “Gaesa acquired its entire network of companies inside and outside of Cuba: corporations located in tax heavens like Panama, retail stores in local currency and dollars, gas stations, real estate businesses, exports, imports, wholesale businesses”.

Other key companies absorbed include Cuba’s largest state-owned tourism conglomerate Grupo de Turismo Gaviota; state-owned telecommunications monopoly Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. (Etecsa); and one of Cuba’s biggest commercial banks, Banco Financiero Internacional (BFI), among others, which are also subject to US sanctions.

Major hermeticism surrounds Gaesa, which, headed up by Raúl Castro’s former son-in-law Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja until his death in 2022, remains closely linked to the Castro dynasty. A 20 May report by British newspaper Financial Times describes it as “a black box”, adding: “It has no website and does not publish details about its finances or what profits are transferred to the state. Even its ownership structure is a secret.”

With this secrecy attributed in part to Havana’s attempt to avoid US sanctions, speculation persists as to Gaesa’s wealth. In August 2025, the Miami Herald published a piece claiming to have obtained a “trove of secret accounting documents” proving that Gaesa’s assets amounted to some US$17.9bn. However, in an interview with US-based independent media outlet Belly of the Beast, published in August 2025, Cuba expert Emily Morris, a research fellow at University College London’s Institute of the Americas, questioned these claims on various grounds, not least as some of the values cited by the Herald in US dollars could be in Cuban pesos. If this were the case, Morris said that Gaesa’s total assets would not be US$17.9bn but CUP17.9bn, equating to US$746m.

Castro indictment

Also on 20 May, the US Department of Justice unveiled the indictment against Raúl Castro. The case involves the shootdown on 24 February 1996 by the Cuban military of two unarmed civilian light airplanes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR), a 1990s Miami non-profit that patrolled the Straits of Florida to assist ‘balseros’ (rafters) – Cubans that sought to flee the island using improvised boats. Three US citizens and one US national were killed. Raúl Castro was defence minister at the time.

The incident, which Havana justified on the grounds that the planes had violated its airspace, triggered the biggest crisis between the two countries since the Cold War. It significantly strengthened support for the 1996 Helms-Burton act which was signed by former president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), hardening the US embargo and codifying it into law.

The indictment charges Castro and five others, former military pilots Lorenzo Alberto Pérez-Pérez, Emilio José Palacio Blanco, José Fidel Gual Barzaga, Raúl Simanca Cárdenas, and Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, with conspiring to kill US nationals while Castro and Pérez-Pérez face additional charges of destruction of aircraft and murder. If convicted all face a maximum penalty of life imprisonment or death.

With only one person convicted so far in relation to the case, US acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said an arrest warrant had been issued for Castro, adding: “This is not a symbolic indictment. We expect him to show up, either by his own will or by another way”. However, writing on social media, Orlando J. Pérez, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas, said: “It’s hard to see how this ends up as anything other than a huge symbolic show to satisfy the anxieties of the Cuban-American constituency ahead of the midterms. The prospects that Raúl Castro will end up in a US court are infinitesimal.” 

• Conviction over 1996 shootdown

In 2001, Gerardo Hernández, one of the so-called ‘Cuban Five’ – Cuban intelligence agents arrested in Miami in 1998 and convicted of espionage in 2001, received a life sentence in relation to the shootdown of the two planes. He was however released from his prison sentence in December 2014 as part of a landmark prisoner swap amid the rapprochement which took place between Cuba and the US under former president Barack Obama (2009-2017). One of the five former pilots indicted on 20 May, Lorenzo Alberto Pérez-Pérez, had previously been indicted in 2003 in the US over the case, along with his brother Francisco Pérez-Pérez, another co-pilot, and General Rubén Martínez Puente, a Cuban military officer who died in 2021, although the case did not make it to trial.