Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced this Thursday through an official note that Alejandro Gil Fernández, who was separated at the beginning of February from the positions of vice prime minister and Minister of Economy, committed “serious errors” and therefore is under investigation.
The statement issued assures that, from now on, the Ministry of the Interior will initiate “the corresponding actions for the complete clarification of these behaviors” and that there will be “zero tolerance” with the former minister.
Although Díaz-Canel does not mention what type of errors Gil Fernández committed, he said that “from the very beginning of these actions, the person involved has acknowledged serious accusations.”
For the moment, the former minister has not commented on the matter.
Among his last publications on
The official note states that, as part “of the invariable ethics of the Cuban Revolution during these 65 years,” the leadership of the Communist Party and the Government “has never allowed, nor will it ever allow, the proliferation of corruption, simulation and insensitivity".
He also lets it be known that Gil Fernández resigned from being a member of the Central Committee of the Party and Deputy to the National Assembly of People's Power.
Díaz-Canel assured that there will be “zero tolerance with this type of demonstrations” and that they are aware that “the higher the level of trust placed in a cadre, the greater the rigor and intransigence with which actions will be taken in response to events of this nature.” nature".
After announcing a series of economic measures that would be put into practice this year in the face of the accelerated debacle of the Cuban economy, the Government announced the dismissal of Gil Fernández, who since 2018 was the maximum face of the economy in Cuba.
At that time, Díaz-Canel did not explain why they decided to “release him from his positions” and replace him from now on with Joaquín Alonso Vázquez, the then minister-president of the Central Bank of Cuba.
To Gil Fernández, who upon leaving office also left a country completely in crisis, with an economy that contracted 2% last year and an inflation of almost 30%, some economists attribute serious errors and failed plans such as the so-called Task Ordering, which sought the end of the double currency in Cuba and implied a reform in prices.
Others highlight his insistence on promoting small and medium-sized businesses called MSMEs.
What almost everyone agrees on is that a single person is not responsible for the state of precariousness that Cuba has reached in recent times.
“He is not the only one responsible for the economic results that he has left,” Cuban economist Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, former director of the Center for Studies of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana, recently told EL PAÍS.
“In Cuba there is a high centralization, which means that the main decisions are approved by higher levels.
The power structures are designed so that no one takes a different path, and I am not referring to a change in the system, but rather changes in the way the economy is done, such as a new role for the market.”
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