Madrid/A total of 13 people, including four private business owners, were detained last October and are under precautionary measures for what the Cuban regime describes as “theft of remittances.” Reasons for Cuba announces this this Thursday, in a delivery that aims to warn about a crime that is, in reality, the scheme for the entry into the Island of almost all money transfers from abroad.
“Large monetary flows that previously entered the country are today retained abroad, in the hands of a controversial figure: the financier”, whose role consists, denounces the official space, in “capturing money from remittances sent from abroad, fundamentally from the United States.” Part of the income it obtains, the note continues, is allocated “to the purchase of imports that require forms of non-state management to develop its commercial operations in Cuba.”
In turn, private businesses deliver the equivalent amount in national territory, “from the cash acquired in their collections” and the “financier” collects a percentage of the profits.
This way of operating, says Razones de Cuba, is “conditioned by the tightening of the blockade against Cuba.” The text refers, without explaining it, to the suspension of Western Union money transfers (WU) at the beginning of this year, after the incorporation of Orbit SA – a company that was created to assume the management of remittances to replace Fincimex, sanctioned in 2020 for its connection with the Cuban military, but which in reality It also depended on this statebelonging to the Gaesa conglomerate – to the List of Restricted Entities in Cuba by the United States.
After the pedagogical introduction, they present as an example the “criminal network” that led to the arrest of the 13 people.
The measure had to do with the purpose of the Donald Trump Administration to eliminate the intermediation of the military in sending money to Cuban families. Already before that, but intensified since then, the citizens of the Island had already devised another way of receiving remittances, informally, so that, according to different studies, they removed Gaesa 95% of those financial operations.
Although it is a modus operandi widespread on the Island, preferred by Cubans instead of other official means, it is, Razones de Cuba protests, “a round deal, where the one who loses the most is the Cuban people.”
After the pedagogical introduction, they present as an example the “criminal network” discovered by the Ministry of the Interior and which led to the arrest of the 13 people. The leader, they point out with all the names and surnames, is Humberto Julio Mora Caballero, a Cuban from Camagüey residing in Miami, from where he “directed” the operations.
“Humberto has structured a criminal chain that has allowed him to set up a system for collecting remittances sent by the relatives of Cubans living in the United States,” declared Yisnel Rivero Crespo, head of the Department of Economic Crimes of the Ministry of the Interior. Once the money is received in US territory, he emphasizes, Mora Caballero “mobilizes his employees in Cuba to compile, in various provinces of the country, the collections from private businesses.”
It is, this military officer indicates, a “broad, strong and diverse network, with a high level of material resources”, which “has moved more than 1,000 million pesos and a quarter of a million dollars just between February and September 2025.”
However, they clarify, this is not the first time they have acted against this “network”: “Last July, assets and cash associated with criminal activity were seized, but the permanence of the ringleader in the United States allowed him to form another scheme, very similar in its operation, against which action was now taken in October.”
Likewise, they assure that they notified the US authorities “on more than one occasion” of the existence of this network, “without taking specific actions to neutralize it.” The “theft of remittances,” they advise, “is also illegal under US law. Continued violations force the financier to use front men to, through third-party bank accounts, mask tax evasion.”
The text does not lack a pun The Touchto which the regime blame for the devaluation of the peso qualifying their actions – that is, offering daily data on the dollar rate in the informal market – as “economic terrorism” in the service of the United States. When lamenting the scams that can occur due to the “participation of criminal networks in the import process” due to the “absence of official support in transactions,” they add: “Let us add the instability of the exchange market, where a pseudoscientific exchange rate governs, manipulated from abroad.”
To solve this “direct attack” on “sovereignty”, Razones de Cuba asserts that the Government has an infallible recipe: “Macroeconomic stabilization measures in process, with an official exchange rate that resembles the Cuban reality.”
