This Friday, the Supreme People’s Court (TSP) of Cuba declared the two convictions against the former Minister of Economy and former Vice Prime Minister final. Alejandro Gilincluding life imprisonment for espionage, as confirmed EFE.
The court informed the parties that it did not admit the two appeals that the defense had presented to both sentences, the one related to espionage and the one that grouped nearly a dozen charges for corruption crimes such as embezzlement, bribery, tax evasion and money laundering.
Gil was fired in February 2024 and a month later his arrest and a judicial investigation were announced after “serious errors” were detected. In November, the Attorney General’s Office formally charged him with eleven crimes, with espionage framing the case in a qualitatively different narrative.
A figure very close to President Miguel Díaz-Canel and a member of the political bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), Gil is the highest political official to fall from grace in at least 15 years on the island.
The former minister was tried last November in a double hearing and on December 8 the TSP announced the convictions in both cases.
The court found the former minister guilty of espionage, for which he received a life sentence. For the rest of the crimes, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The TSP explained in a statement that the former minister “deceived the leadership of the country and the people he represented, thereby causing damage to the economy” and “failed to comply with work processes with the classified official information he handled, stole it, damaged it and finally made it available to enemy services.”
The judges considered that these “highly harmful behaviors” make the investigated deserving of a “severe criminal response” by establishing that “treason to the Homeland is the most serious of crimes and whoever commits it is subject to the most severe sanctions.”
Díaz-Canel promises “all-out war” against corruption after condemning former minister Alejandro Gil
Until his fall, Gil acted on the island as one of the cabinet members with the greatest media exposure.
He was also in charge of implementing the great reform of 2021 (designed by others since 2010), which tried to end the use of a double currency in Cuba. The controversial Ordering Task was a failure that sank the value of the peso and opened the doors of the current dollarization on the island.
He was also in charge of opening the economy to small private companies (banned for decades) and applying the first adjustment measures to try to stabilize the economy. Among them, the controversial rise in fuel prices stood out, increases of up to 400%.
