Cuba: Will There Be More Transparency This Time?
HAVANA TIMES – Last week I discussed some of the most striking points about the upcoming trial of former Cuban Minister of Economy Alejandro Gil, and suggested that we might be witnessing yet another scapegoat—another individual face of a purge meant to prune the tree, but not to heal it from its roots.
The serious accusations against Gil, which include espionage, will have to be proven if the regime wants to show the world that this is a transparent legal process.
This kind of “cleansing” is nothing new. Since the early days of the Revolution, it has been carried out against various commanders who began to show disagreement with the direction things were taking.
The most famous case was that of Hubert Matos, a popular leader who attempted a sedition in 1959 itself. Fidel Castro immediately sent one of his closest collaborators, Camilo Cienfuegos, to arrest him—and malicious tongues still say it was a masterstroke to kill two birds with one stone, since Camilo never returned.
Decades passed before a similar scandal erupted: Case No. 1 of 1989, which we mentioned in the previous article, and its sequel, Case No. 2—less publicized but equally significant.
In this second trial, former Minister of the Interior Jose Abrantes, Fidel Castro’s chief bodyguard for 30 years, was prosecuted for corruption and tolerance in the case of Arnaldo Ochoa, the main defendant in Case No. 1.
Other lower-ranking officials had been removed earlier, but this case marked the beginning of a period that still continues—where every so often, a high-ranking figure “loses his head,” commits “errors” that are never properly explained, and is generally sent to what’s called the “Pajama Plan,” that is, home—out of the public eye and stripped of any official position.
Abrantes was not sentenced to death, but he died in prison under strange circumstances barely two years later. According to the official report, he died of a heart attack at the age of 60.
All of this was orchestrated to conceal the Cuban government’s involvement in drug trafficking and to give the impression that the Castros were uninvolved, when in fact they had given these military officers carte blanche to obtain dollars by any means.
The truth is that since that major scandal, the process of purging Cuba’s power structure has been unbroken, because as none of them can live on their salary, they try to use their influence to obtain more privileges than their positions officially provide.
Just three years later, in 1992, Carlos Aldana Escalante—considered the number-three man in Cuba’s power hierarchy after the Castros—was ousted and sidelined.
This was the same man who had sought to dissolve the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), dictate guidelines for the press, and limit critical expression among artists and intellectuals. He was dismissed from his duties and expelled from the Communist Party for “serious defects in job performance” and “grave personal errors.”
Behind the scenes, he was linked to another businessman (Eberto Lopez Morales) who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for fraud and document falsification. Aldana himself was never brought to criminal trial. He was assigned to a tourism company in the Topes de Collantes area, in central Cuba, until his retirement. Nothing more was heard of him until his death last year.
Less than a decade later, his successor as the regime’s number three, former Foreign Minister Robertico Robaina, fell into disgrace. He was “dishonorably” expelled from the Communist Party, accused of disloyalty, of financially benefiting from his relationships with foreign representatives and businesspeople, and of presenting himself as a candidate for a future transition.
The post seems cursed, as it was later held by Felipe Perez Roque—also purged years afterward.
But before that, in 2004, Marcos Portal, former Minister of Basic Industry, was removed for “strong tendencies toward self-sufficiency and underestimating the views of other experienced comrades,” which “finally led him to serious errors in several spheres of his activity,” according to the official note. His successor, Yadira García, fell by her own weight in 2010, along with other heavyweights of the nomenklatura such as Jorge Luis Sierra Cruz and Pedro Saez Montejo.
Carlos Valenciaga, Fidel Castro’s chief of staff, celebrated his own birthday in one of the halls of the Palace of the Revolution in 2006—at a time when Castro was on the brink of death. They let it pass, but took note, and he became one of the key pieces in the next great purge, which took him down as well.
The biggest purge came in March 2009, with the mass dismissal of several of the regime’s fundamental figures: Carlos Lage, Vice President of the Council of State; Felipe Perez Roque, Foreign Minister; Fernando Ramirez de Estenoz, Head of International Relations of the Communist Party of Cuba; and Otto Rivero, former leader of the Communist Youth and Vice President of the Council of Ministers.
From his sickbed, Fidel Castro washed his hands of the affair, writing in one of his “Reflections” that “the honey of power—for which they never made any sacrifices—awoke in them ambitions that led them to an unworthy role. The external enemy was filled with illusions about them.”
The position of First Secretary of the Union of Young Communists (UJC)—the seedbed of the Communist Party—is also a hot seat. Besides Robaina, Valenciaga, Lage, and Rivero, others who have been toppled include Luis Orlando Dominguez (1987), Juan Contino (1994), Victoria Velazquez (1997), and Julio Martinez (2009).
No account of high-level purges would be complete without mentioning Juan Carlos Robinson Agramonte, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “continuous abuse of influence” in a summary trial. In fact, he is the only one this century to have faced a civilian trial—behind closed doors, of course.
That’s why it’s so important to exert pressure for Gil’s trial to be public, in keeping with the seriousness of the accusations against him.