At the Guamá store, in the city of Pinar del Río, there are two types of offers that vary according to who is paying: a resident of the island or an émigré.
If you go to its physical location on José Martí street, you can purchase with your “Free Convertible Currency” bank card –the MLC (by its Spanish acronym) is the Cuban bank dollar, which you can only procure with hard currency- a limited number of products: coffee, tomato puree, beer, juices, fruit preserves and, as sole beef offer in November of last year, ground sausages. The shortages are such that, in order not to leave the display cases empty, employees fill them with the same product, over and over again.
Now, if you make your way to Guamá’s website, the variety of products available is amply multiplied. Not only are there more types of food items, but also personal cleaning products, tools, and even bicycles. In the digital store, for instance, instead of just ground sausage, there are 16 other beef products available: meatballs, hamburgers, steak and full pork shanks.
The problem is that the only w ay to acquire those products on the store’s webpage is by paying with the bank cards linked to international accounts, a transaction that only Cubans who live abroad can make.
In order to implement this new strategy, GAESA has resorted to a new entrepreneurial context. When any individual buys any product in the online Guamá store, that individual is, in fact, making their purchase from two companies registered in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
These companies and others linked to them, were created in recent years by the Graverán family, who is also linked to GAESA, as this investigation ascertained from information obtained from the commercial registries in Spain and Canada.
However, then they chose Spain, a country whose companies must abide by certain transparency requirements, GAESA is making visible some of its operations and giving an idea, although limited, of its lucrative and obscure businesses.
In 2020 and 2021 alone, these Spain-based businesses invoiced at least 8.7 million Euros from online sales, according to information available in a trade registry in Spain. This data is only partial, since the information available for 2021 is still not complete (one of the two companies is still not reporting its 2021 income). Which means that income from these transactions is actually higher.
These figures also highlight how GAESA, the Cuban regime’s most powerful entrepreneurial group, has joined the surge of online trade that the island has undertaken since the start of the Covid pandemic and the deep crisis that the pandemic aggravated.
Ever since then, state companies that have no physical stores found in the web a way to secure hard currency. Some of them created their own platforms, like the entrepreneurial group Flora y Fauna which, as already reported by CubaNet, is linked to the popular online store SuperMarket23. State companies also resorted to private intermediaries, like Cuban-American businessman Hugo Cancio, who manages the well-known website Katapulk.
However, GAESA, which has the most important physical-store network in Cuba where it can sell its merchandise in MLC (convertible currency), wouldn’t seem to need this strategy to obtain hard currency. Before the pandemic, providing supplies to the physical stores of GAESA was a regular occurrence, according to the local standards. However, since 2020, physical merchandise began to disappear while availability of those same items began to increase online.
In this manner, GAESA has prioritized the revenue t derives from foreigners or Cubans who reside abroad, even if that means cero supplies for the population of the island, something that can be very beneficial to the military conglomerate but not necessarily for the national economy or for Cuban consumers, according to experts we consulted.
In order to accomplish this, GAESA has resorted to the creation of a network of companies in a discreet corner of the Baleares Islands, an archipelago located in Spain’s Mediterranean coast.
In spite of the fact that the entities that make up the military conglomerate are subject to U.S. sanctions, these Spanish companies are still unknown and are not being looked out for by authorities, and thus can operate in relative tranquility, going about their business of buying and selling merchandise.
This allows the powerful arm of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR, by its Spanish acronym) to manage a flow of totally opaque money that is not subject to any accountability and that remains outside the Cuban banking system. Nothing is known about the (at least) 8.4 Euros that the military conglomerate channeled in 2020 and 2021 through Spain for online sales. It is not known where the profits end up or what GAESA’s senior officers do with them.
GAESA also operates in Spain
The network of companies that would make possible GAESA’s online sales strategy was started in Spain in December 2017. Back then, the military conglomerate set up a company called Nactws SL in the European country, in an office in the city of Palma de Mallorca, Baleares Islands.
For its creation, GAESA had the collaboration of the Spanish consulting firm Grupo D-Versia, which lent its offices as well as gave professional services for setting up the company. D-Versia specializes in incorporation, accounting and accountability services for companies; it is managed by the Spaniard Carlos Lorenzo San Martín.
The selection of its name – Nactws SL- was not accidental. GAESA had already set up a company by the same name in Canada in 2003. In fact, GAESA had used a Canadian company whose name was Nactws to purchase, among other things, appliances in China in 2012, as recorded in the international trade registry Panjiva.
The selection of the location also was not at random. Palma de Mallora is the capital city of Spain’s tourism industry. Some of the main Spanish hotel chains are headquartered there, among them Meliá and Iberostar, which are principal GAESA partners.
Globalia, the company that operates the Be Live hotels and Air Europa Airlines, is also headquartered in Mallorca. Recently, GAESA reached an agreement with this company to develop a project called El Salado Resort.
The creation of the Nactws SL company was just the beginning. In the following months, the military conglomerate created at least half a dozen companies in Spain, all of them located in the same Palma de Mallorca office with the help of Grupo D-Versia.
At first, this group of companies didn’t seem to have an expressed purpose, but, little by little, their purpose was revealed. Nactws SL and two additional companies created in Spain –Lorengrave SL and Venta Online de Repuestos SL- started to operate digital stores from GAESA’s portal EnvíosCuba, as stated in the stores’ websites.
In addition, Lorengrave SL started setting up a telephone recharging service to Cuba called Envíominutos, an activity that also benefits GAWESA, principal stockholder of the Cuban telecommunications monopoly ETECSA.
Another one of the companies created in Spain, Sheffield Ventures, aimed its activity at the
business or remittances, transactions traditionally controlled by GAESA. Sheffield Ventures started to operate a page called Envíodinero which allows funds to be forwarded to MLC bank accounts good for buying in physical GAESA stores, or recharge AIS cards, another GAESA business.
Finally, a company called Envíos Ultramarinos SL also created a digital store called Envíosultramarinos. This outfit belongs to another one of its companies, Inversiones Scugog SL.
Activity for these companies intensified with the start of the pandemic in 2020, as digital commerce gained strength in Cuba and the country plummeted into the worst economic crisis since the so-called “Special Period”.
This is when GAESA decided to increase providing supplying to its digital stores and reduce product supply at its physical stores. This caused an immediate surge in the activities of the network of businesses in Palma de Mallorca.
CubaNet corroborated that on November 3, when the GAESA Guamá store in Pinar del Río, recorded no sale of domestic appliances, at the store’s warehouse there were refrigerators, electric frying pots, ovens, irons, air conditioners and televisions which would only be purchased if one paid from abroad through one of the stores on the EnvíosCuba portal.
The business flourished so much that, in 2021, the company bought a residence, a parking lot and one vehicle in Palma de Mallorca, valued at 826,000 Euros, according to the invoices presented at the commercial registry.
Nactws-2021
This shows how GAESA has added a new way of exclusion from its sales system: now it prioritizes getting money from emigres directly from wherever they are located, and not waiting until these emigres send remittances to Cuba and then waiting for their families to spend this hard currency at the state stores.
The Cuban Armed Forces business conglomerate, which was headed until his death in July 2022 by Division General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, former son-in-law to Raul Castro, controls the main lines of the national economy, among them remittances, MLC retail business, and tourism.
We are talking about an empire that operates in the shadows, with a vast network of business around the world, many of them in offshore tax havens or in jurisdictions that grant anonymity, like Panama, Cyprus, Malta and Lichtenstein. This allows the Cuban military to operate in international markets all the while eluding U.S. government sanctions, and allowing them to handle large sums of money in an opaque manner and being accountable to no one for that money.
According to prior investigations, the Cuban Armed Forces conglomerate operates in at least 11 countries. However, until now, Spain was not on the list of nations with a known GAESA presence.
This is not surprising because Spain has been historically a trade partner for GAESA, and not only in the hotel business.
Spanish companies make up the greater number of companies operating in the Mariel Duty-Free Development Zone, a business that is also under the control of the Cuban military. Of the 62 companies established in the Mariel Zone, 10 are from Spain.
In addition, Spanish companies are among the providers of supplies and products for many GAESA companies. According to the most recent data available, in 2021 Spain occupied third place among the countries that traded with Cuba, after China and Venezuela.
At present, each month Spain exports to Cuba approximately 60 million Euros worth of goods, according to data gathered by the Spanish government. Food is the item that Cuba buys the most from Spain, a portion of which end up at the stores or the hotels operated by GAESA.
The ever-so-discreet Graverán family and its service to the Cuban state
The network of Spanish companies created by GAESA to operate its online stores have in common, in addition to having retained the services of the D-Versia Group, a particular Cuban family. All of these companies have as administrators, directors or reps Vladimir Graverán Becerra, his wife Sonia Álvarez Pérez, or their daughter Anabel Graverán Álvarez.
This family, particularly Vladimir Graverán, have a long history of service to GAESA’s operations abroad.
A graduate in engineering in Cuba, Vladimir Gracerán settled in Toronto, Canada some 20 years ago, and ever since he has created companies that serve the Cuban military conglomerate in activities related to information, remittances to Cuba and online commerce.
Contrary to other individuals that CubaNet has investigated and who fulfill similar functions abroad for the Cuban government, Graverán seems to be more careful in exposing his private life on social media. For this research, we were only able to find a photograph of this engineer who holds key posts with EnvíosCuba and other GAESA businesses.
What we were able to find was his name or that of his relatives on the registration papers of nine companies –three in Canada and six in Spain- linked to the Cuban sate and specifically the Cuban Armed Forces.
The first steps in Graverán’s career at GAESA’s service go back at least to the beginning of the century, when the engineer and his family created in Canada two companies: Nactws Inc (the same name that would be used later to create the company in Palma de Mallorca) and G4ITS Inc. These two companies, engaged in web services that were at an incipient stage in Cuba, would be the seed of Cuba’s online business activity.
From these companies originated the first versions of GAESA’s portal EnvíosCuba. Both companies also provided the platforms for other websites of the Cuban state or GAESA, as was the case with the hotel chain Isla Azul, Cubanacán travel agency and Cuba’s International Tourisim Fair.
Also under Graverán’s name, the company Treew Inc emerged in Toronto, a Canadian business that at present manages a group of online stores. As we revealed in an investigation published in May 2022, Treew is part of a group of companies that manage the Supermarket23 webpage, and other similar businesses. Behind Supermarket23 are several Cuban individuals tightly linked with Grupo Empresarial Flora y Fauna, managed by Revolution Commander Gruillermo García Frías.
Therefore, Vladimir Graverán is at the root of the two largest online sales platforms in Cuba today: Supermarket23 and EnvíosCuba.
In Spain, Graverán copied the scheme they had implemented in Canada. He and his family began to create companies that were key to the development of several GAESA businesses. If the companies he set up at the start of the century in Canada served to take the first steps with online commerce in Cuba, the ones he set up in Spain in recent years have been good in a new phase: setting up widespread online sales.
The accounting presented to the commercial registry do not allow us to determine the point to which Graverán and his family profited from this operation, but one of the companies they created in Spain filed that in 2021 it had paid 123,000 Euros in salaries. It is also not clear if the real estate and the vehicle they purchased in Palma de Mallorca benefit the family or not.
On two occasions, CubaNet tried to obtain a statement from Graverán through his Linkedin profile, but until the date of this report, we have not received an answer.
In addition, in early 2021, the Trump administration issued a ban on having comercial relations with the bank of the Cuban military, Banco Financiero Internacional (BFI, by its Spanish acronym), which was essential for the regime’s international commercial operations.
With less hard currency in-country, and more difficulties for using hard currency abroad, GAESA would have found in the option of online commerce a way to alleviate its problems.
While it’s true that the Cuban population faces difficulties in receiving US dollars from their relatives abroad, now instead of cash, Cubans can receive bags of food products or any other products purchased by those relatives. While at present the military companies face bigger problems to buy and sell abroad, they can now present themselves as Spanish companies.
For economist and professor Omar Everleny, GAESA’s preference to obtain its revenue through a network created in Spain can’t be understood if one doesn’t take into account U.S. sanctions. Everleny arrives at the conclusion that having its money abroad simplifies the movement of funds among the conglomerate of companies, and “makes it the more difficult to identify the operations of the Cuban state.”
To this economist, the avoid the national banking system also could make it easier for GAESA to pay its suppliers.
At present, Cuba has enormous debts with its suppliers. Everleny remembers that the island’s authorities tried to negotiate payment terms of up to 320 days, but this turned out to be insufficient time and later Cuba requested to double the postponement period.
The official figures published in Anuario Estadístico de Cuba show how Cuba’s debt with its international providers snowballed. Between 2013 and 2019, the debt almost tripled, reaching US$ 7.4 billion. Suspiciously, there still has not been any publication of a more updated sum that Cuba owes its providers.
In light of this panorama, Everleny states that for providers of Cuban companies it is better that they sell their products on the web and that the funds be deposited abroad to pay with greater ease and speed, instead of waiting for the money be collected in Cuba.
However, experts conclude that even if this strategy is economically viable for GAESA, it doesn’t mean that it is a positive one for the national economy or for Cuban consumers.
For Everleny, to prioritize supplying the online stores before the physical stores is not feasible from a social point of view. “The majority of the population is the one that buys in physical stores, and the minority is the one that has access to products on the online platforms. Every day it becomes more difficult to purchase basic products at physical stores in the country, such as milk,” states the expert.
Pavel Vidal, also an economist, states that this strategy is not a positive move for the national banking system, and therefore for the country, least of all at a time of economic recession. “The optimum situation is that resources be found within the national economy and its banking system. If all state companies place their funds abroad, nothing will improve,” states the professor.
ARTÍCULO DE OPINIÓN
Las opiniones expresadas en este artículo son de exclusiva responsabilidad de quien las emite y no necesariamente representan la opinión de CubaNet.
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