How is it possible that Alejandro Gil Fernández committed ten serious crimes without Raúl Castro, Miguel Díaz-Canel and the ministers of the Armed Forces and the Interior knowing about it?
PUERTO PADRE. _ This Halloween, and as if saying “trick or treat” according to American folklore, euphemistically, while thousands of people in the flooded Cuban East splashed around looking for what they could recover in their homes devastated by Hurricane Mellissa, the Attorney General’s Office announced against the accused former Minister of Economy and Planning Alejandro Gil Fernandez and other accused, _whose identity has not been revealed_ their inquisitorial conclusions. In this way they are closing the preparatory phase of criminal investigation, which will now become a case in the Chamber of Crimes against State Security of the Supreme Court.
Although we will have to wait for the decisions of the judges who, ultimately, are the ones who, taking into account legal objectivity (the injured property or interest), and ideological objectivity (the goal that the culprit proposed when committing the illicit act), will qualify the crimes for which Gil Fernández and the other defendants will be tried. Therefore, the conclusions of the Prosecutor’s Office are still provisional, even so there is a punitive landscape through which we will see this case pass, in which we would incur reductionism if we compared it with other famous ones, such as Cases 1 and 2 of 1989, which in themselves had notable differences when the accused got rid of mortal naiveties.
Out of public interest, doing an a priori exploration of the crimes in kind, understood according to their typology, we see that Gil Fernández is accused of espionage, which is a crime against the external security of the State, and whose sanction, by itself, is enough to deprive a person of freedom perpetually, and even of life. Although it is not necessarily necessary to deliver or offer information to an enemy State, it can be a friend, since it is collaboration with the operational information services of a foreign State that constitutes espionage.
Likewise, Gil Fernández is charged with five crimes against the administration and jurisdiction, which are:
- Acts detrimental to economic activity or contracting, criminal offense charged to those who, with the purpose of affecting the economy or the credit of the State, or knowing that this result may occur, alter reports or present or use in any way false data on economic plans, fail to comply with the procedures established for economic activities or for the execution, control or liquidation of State budgets or related to the contracting, issuance or use of credit documents.
- Bribery, a transgression that in the public sector consists of the official receiving directly or through intermediaries, for himself or for others, gifts, presents or any other advantage or benefit in order to execute or omit an act related to his position. Likewise, anyone who demands or requests a gift or present, advantage or benefit, or who gives it to carry out, omit, or delay an action within the jurisdiction of the public administration, incurs bribery.
- Influence trafficking, which is the criminal offense that occurs when influencing or offering to influence a public official or employee, public business is promoted, managed, processed or resolved, or decisions or acts intended to obtain for oneself or for other illicit benefits derived from such efforts are promoted. It would also be a crime under this concept to receive or cause to be promised for oneself or others any benefit or advantage as remuneration for fraudulent mediation.
- Violation of the rules for the protection of classified documents, a crime charged to an official or employee who, in bad faith, maliciously, violates legal provisions, destroys, alters, hides, changes, damages or by any other means renders classified documents useless.
- Theft and damage to documents or other objects in official custody, an offense criminally attributable to anyone who steals, alters, hides, destroys or damages documents, files, papers or objects deposited in archives or other places intended for official conservation, or entrusted to the custody of a public official.
The crime against property rights charged to former Minister Alejandro Gil is embezzlement, a violation that occurs when someone who, for reasons of office, has the administration, care or availability of state-owned property or any other possession of others, appropriates them for himself or another person, or consents to others appropriating them, or authorizes payments that do not correspond to services performed or barely performed.
Presumably and according to the Prosecutor’s Office, a crime against public faith had been committed by Gil Fernández, this transgression being conceptualized as falsification of public documents, a fact that occurs when the accused creates in whole or in part a false public document, or alters a legitimate one, or contributes to recording inaccurate data, statements or facts, or may insert documents in official records or books, either to the detriment of the national interest or of a person, with the deletion, concealment, or destruction of the document, whether national or foreign and whether the crime is consummated or in the preparatory acts phase.
The Prosecutor’s Office charges the former Minister of Economy and Planning with two crimes against public finances:
- Tax evasion, typified by reason of the position and concerning the concealment, omission or alteration of the calculation, determination or payment of taxes, fees, contributions or any other tax obligation that, due to the obligation of his position, the accused had to register and report and for which considerable damage was supposedly caused to the national economy. But perhaps this accusation should have been supported by the results of the procedure according to Instruction No. 236 of November 15, 2016 of the Governing Council of the Supreme Court and related provisions.
- Money laundering, which is the criminal offense incurred by anyone who acquires, converts, transfers, uses, has in their possession, or conceals, hides or prevents the determination of the origin of: resources, funds, goods, rights, shares or other forms of participation relative to them, with the purpose of hiding or dissimulating their illicit origin, or with knowledge or having to know or assume due to the occasion or circumstances of the operation that they come directly or indirectly from facts related to organized crime, transnational crime, trafficking in stolen goods, trafficking in drugs, weapons or their parts, parts and ammunition, human trafficking, including the sale and trafficking of minors, extortion, terrorism, pimping or other international criminal offenses.
Now it is useful to ask: How is it possible that Alejandro Gil Fernández and other defendants whose identity has not been published, committed these ten crimes, serious, some of abstract danger, but others of concrete danger, without Raul CastroMiguel Díaz-Canel and the ministers of the Armed Forces and the Interior did not know it from secret information, from criminal investigation, counterintelligence, military counterintelligence, intelligence, or, from mere tips from neighborhood committees that are directed by a convicted professional spy, Gerardo Hernández?
As in Halloween, _but not in children’s games_ it is about “trick or treating”, and in the next article we will try to show how in a totalitarian country like Cuba, it is not possible for, in congruence of time and space, a person to commit ten crimes without dozens of eyes and ears in criminal connivance.
