Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA) as a “Cuban military-controlled financial conglomerate that steals millions in aid for the Cuban people at the behest of the regime.” The United States sanctioned GAESA on May 7, 2026, under Executive Order 14404, signed by President Trump on May 1. The State Department issued the designations while the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administered them.
Founded by Raúl Castro, GAESA is the economic arm of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and one of the country’s most powerful institutions. Despite existing within a nominally socialist state, it operates under an opaque structure resembling a capitalist corporation, with subsidiaries incorporated in Panama, Cyprus, and Liberia to bypass U.S. sanctions restrictions.
It controls an estimated 40 percent or more of the island’s economy, with gross profits representing close to 37 percent of Cuba’s GDP, total revenues 3.2 times greater than the annual Cuban state budget, and exports accounting for roughly 34 percent of the island’s total. The Food Monitor Program, in a formal complaint to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, described GAESA as “a state within a state,” accusing it of worsening hunger and malnutrition through monopolistic control and financial opacity.
GAESA dominates Cuba’s most strategic and profitable sectors through a web of subsidiaries: tourism through Gaviota, retail and wholesale trade through CIMEX and TRD Caribe, and finance through RAFIN S.A. and Banco Financiero Internacional. It also controls remittances, logistics, port operations, including the Port of Mariel, construction, transportation, and foreign trade.
Its former chief, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, the former son-in-law of Raúl Castro, was separately sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, which froze his U.S.-jurisdiction assets and prohibited American persons from dealing with him.
Leaked internal accounting documents reported by the Miami Herald showed GAESA held approximately $18 billion in current assets as of March 2024, of which $14.5 billion sat in undisclosed overseas bank accounts, even as Cuba’s broader economy collapsed. The U.S. State Department stated in its May 2026 sanctions announcement that GAESA controls up to $20 billion in illicit assets funneled into hidden overseas accounts, and that GAESA’s executive president Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera is personally responsible for managing those assets internationally.
Those funds exist entirely outside the Cuban government’s budget. In 2024, Cuba’s State Comptroller was dismissed after 14 years in office. The dismissal came after she publicly admitted that she lacked access to GAESA’s financial accounts. The conglomerate is entirely exempt from government audit. “There’s the Cuban government and they have a budget,” Rubio told reporters, “and then there’s this private company that has more money than the government does.
Hellbound and Down 