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Report casts the economic power of the FAR and GAESA as the central obstacle to a transition
A study by the CubaxCuba platform published on October 22 argues that no democratic transition consolidates while the armed forces retain veto power over civilian rule, and says that in Cuba the underlying problem is the economic web they run through GAESA.
The report, titled “Armed forces and subordination to civilian power” and produced by the Comparative Democratic Transitions initiative, examines the experiences of Spain, Chile, Poland and Venezuela to identify the challenges Cuba would face in any process of democratization. Its central conclusion is that “no transition consolidates while the armed forces retain veto power over civilian rule”, in a passage translated by Yamacoa.
The authors warn that removing the military’s political influence is not enough if it keeps economic resources of its own and pockets of autonomy outside the oversight of democratic institutions. “Political autonomy can be curtailed by law, but financial autonomy creates material interests that the institution defends”, the document says, summing the matter up in one sentence: “The economy is the hard core of the issue”, in passages translated by Yamacoa.
The analysis holds that the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) combine features that do not appear together in the comparison cases: they were born of the revolution itself, they are subordinate to a hegemonic party and they are a leading economic player. Through the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), created in the nineties under the Ministry of the FAR, they control tourism businesses, hotel chains, trading corporations and financial entities. “None of the comparison cases presented a fusion of this scale between military command, political power and economic control”, the report stresses, in a passage translated by Yamacoa.
Independent estimates of the size of that web differ. The economist Emilio Morales, in a study published by Cuba Siglo XXI in November 2025, calculated that the conglomerate controls more than 70% of the Cuban economy and 95% of its finances. The economist Pavel Vidal Alejandro, working from leaked GAESA financial statements for 2023 and 2024, put its weight at between a third and 40% of the national economy. Both agree in pointing to an extraordinary concentration of resources under military control with no effective mechanisms of transparency or civilian oversight, according to CiberCuba.
The statements examined by Vidal indicate that GAESA had accumulated some 14,500 million dollars in bank deposits in 2024, within current assets estimated at 18,000 million.
The report recalls that General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, who ran GAESA for decades until his death in 2022, sat on the Communist Party’s Political Bureau, and that the current prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, previously headed Gaviota, the tourism corporation belonging to the conglomerate. The study draws on work by the academics Armando Chaguaceda and Susanne Gratius.
Sources: CiberCuba · CubaxCuba
Data updated: 2026-10-24T16:00:00.000Z