A strong operation and closed businesses around the Court where Alejandro Gil is being tried

Havana/Madrid/The surroundings of the Popular Civil and Family Court of Marianao, in Havana, woke up this Tuesday heavily guarded, but with the visible presence of the international press. There, starting at 9:30, the trial against the highest-ranking official prosecuted by the Cuban justice system in recent decades takes place. Alejandro Gil Fernandezformer Minister of Economy, former Deputy Prime Minister and for years right-hand man of President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

“I saw a lot of photographers and a pile of cars when I took my son to school early,” he told 14ymedio Susana, a neighbor of the place, located on 100th Street and 33rd Street. At that time, traffic was not yet closed, as it was during the hours of the oral hearing. Shops and businesses of all kinds are also closed, and dozens of State Security agents dressed in civilian clothes can be seen scattered around the corners.

The same thing happened in the streets adjacent to the Supreme People’s Court, in Old Havana, the body that issued the statement this Monday informing of the time of the trial today. On each corner near Aguiar, between Obrapía and Obispo, State Security agents were stationed, “disguised” in civilian clothes and in pairs, who looked carefully at anyone who walked by the place, even if it was for a few seconds. “I don’t know why they spend so many resources if the trial is being held somewhere else,” said a witness to the operation ironically.

This Monday, without Gil’s family being notified in advance, the midday news broadcast the TPS statement informing that the oral trial against the former minister would take place less than 24 hours later. The hearing, scheduled for 9:30 am this Tuesday, would be conducted by the Chamber of Crimes against State Security, although they did not provide the court that would try him, nor the address nor the charges that would be resolved there.

The accused’s sister, María Victoria Gil Fernández, assured 14ymedio that the process would be carried out in two independent trials, and that today it would be the one that includes the accusation of espionage, for which the Prosecutor’s Office is asking for 30 years in prison.

According to the TSP note, the process would be held behind closed doors for “reasons of National Security”, based on articles 153 of the Constitution and 477.1 of the Criminal Procedure Law. Only the parties and people authorized by the court would have access, the text continued, read almost without taking their eyes off the paper by the news anchor, a decision that confirmed the opacity with which the Government has handled the case since the dismissal of the minister, in February 2024, and that canceled the request made on their social networks by Gil’s daughter, Laura María, of a fair, public and transparent trialwith the presence of the media.

The Court’s decision cancels the demand that the young woman had made in their social networks that the trial would be transparent and public, so that citizens would directly know the arguments, evidence and details about his father’s alleged crimes. “If they are so sure of their case, why hide it?” questioned Laura María Gil, demanding a process that is not limited to official notes or controlled leaks.

According to a source familiar with the case who requested anonymity for security reasons, the case facing the former Minister of Economy and Finance has twenty more defendants, including “a deputy of the National Assembly of People’s Power and a secretary of the Communist Party.” “The request for him is 30 years, and everyone else is asked for sentences of at least 15 years,” the same informant told 14ymediowho specified where Gil was, whose whereabouts had not been made known since he was arrested in March 2024: the Guanajay maximum security prison, Artemisa, “in a regime against State security.”

The defendants, he continued, are 15 “plus another five or six who were released with precautionary measures.” Of some of them, he asserted, “the name is not said, they are under total secrecy, which implies that they could be soldiers or high-ranking leaders.”

Alejandro Gil Fernández is defended by the lawyer Abel Solá Lópezwith extensive experience in trials against State security. One of them was the one who sentenced, in 2017, Alina López Miyares and her husband, Félix Martín Milanés Fajardo, to 13 and 17 years in prison, respectively, for espionage. That process, carried out on October 2 in the Courtroom of the Marianao Military Court, was also behind closed doors and “without access to the relatives of the accused.”