This is how the international businesses of the Castro family expand

01 June 2024 , 07:25
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This is how the international businesses of the Castro family expand
This is how the international businesses of the Castro family expand

Cuba also has its Castro-bourgeois who, as in the Venezuelan case, enjoy privileged connections with the ruling family, when they are not directly members of it.

Through a thorough review of international commercial records done for this story, the independent Cuban media YucaByte uncovers two export-import networks that extend from Mexico and Spain for the benefit of the clan that has ruled the island since 1959.

It was December 2018. Like every Friday night, at the La Esencia bar , located in a colonial house in El Vedado, the cultural epicenter of Havana, there was a happy hour that was promoted under the name Tarde de Sol.

In the garden of the mansion, along with the Christmas lights, two vinyl gigantographs hung on each side of the columns at the entrance. A group of girls, all of them crowned with Christmas hats, brought and carried buckets with bottles of ice cold beer to the customers who gathered there; almost all of them, tourists and young people from Havana’s social elite - which there is -.

The waitresses wore black T-shirts with a printed logo, the same one seen on the giant prints and buckets: that of Sol beer, a lager from the Mexican brewery Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma , which until that date was barely known in the country. 

Then a four-year period was about to end in which Cuba experienced the relief produced by the thaw with Washington, as part of the rapprochement policy undertaken by Barack Obama’s administration. In the heat of a timid opening by the Cuban regime to private initiative, the national public learned about the refreshing Sol, which soon conquered the domestic market. 

Sol organized raffles at the Havana International Fairs (Fihav), the most important commercial and investment event in the country, as well as photography contests in entertainment magazines. Renowned artists, such as the salsa band Charanga Habanera, or the singer and composer Descemer Bueno, also participated in the brand’s campaigns. 

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Well, who in 2014 composed the song Bailando that would later impose itself on international music billboards along with Enrique Iglesias and Gente de Zona , and who in 2021 took part in the opposition Patria y Vida , even agreed to make a special version of his song, We went far , to record an advertising video for the beer. 

Even in that period of openness, in which the island went from simple tolerance to a lukewarm promotion of commercial ventures, such advertising display - a practice that until then was associated with the disdained capitalism - was too much. Only some kind of official approval could justify it. 

In Cuba, where the government has absolute control of imports and exports, an activity of this nature can only be carried out by a private individual if they have the trust of the Castros or are part of the family. 

A young Cuban, Marco Jesús Amorós Moreno, now 32 years old, was the one who stood out in all that intense promotion. He showed himself as an ambassador of the brand on the island, to encourage “going out a lot, in this case buying a Sol beer, taking photos alone or with your friends, having a good time, and uploading them to the networks,” he described his mission in a interview , in which he also confessed: “I almost couldn’t believe that this was what the job consisted of and that they were also going to pay me to party.” 

Like other young representatives of foreign companies attracted by the boom of the moment, Amorós had his ties; He still has them. He is one of the close friends of a grandson of Fidel Castro, Sandro Castro Arteaga, who in 2021 caused a scandal on social networks with a video in which he boasted of a luxurious Mercedes Benz. 

By 2018, Sandro Castro managed some of the most expensive bars in the capital, such as Fantaxy and EFE , nightlife venues that, like La Esencia , began selling Sol beer and hosting brand promotion activities. . 

But those connections did not necessarily make Marco Amorós the key player in the beer business. In reality, behind the advertising campaign were companies registered in Mexico and Canada, managed in turn by people related to the Castro leadership, who had brought the shipments of beer to Cuba. 

This report traces the commercial records of these and other companies, all included in two extensive international trade networks, active today, and placed at the service of the Cuban regime and the Castro family. Both networks, modeled by two individuals who still operate them: José Israel Adato Steiermann and Héctor Castro Santana. 

Below is revealed, for the first time, the map of connections of these companies, which extends from Mexico and Spain to connect with the Castros in Cuba. These networks not only include the import and sale of beer, but other areas, from telecommunications - where YucaByte began pulling the strings for this investigation - to legal services and the marketing of coal, agricultural products and beverages, among others. products. 

A very cold ’lager’ leaves Cancun to Havana

Just a couple of months after the reestablishment of relations between Cuba and the United States, in February 2015, Mexican businessman José Israel Adato Steiermann founded the limited company Dibermex LLC in Florida, United States. 

The distributor is in charge , among other activities, of marketing its clients’ products in different duty free channels , an attractive market due to the tax exemption and because it includes "military areas, diplomatic services, airports, shipping ports, cruises, ships cargo and commercial and stores in border areas”, as it proclaims on its website. For the necessary logistics, the company has a warehouse in Miami and claims to maintain relationships with more than 250 supplier companies.

Dibermex LLC is one of the four companies that share that name, an acronym for Distribuidora de Bebidas y Refrescos Mexicanos, SA, the precise name of the first company that Adato registered, in 1997, in Panama. 

Dibermex, together with the company Interglobe, also owned by Adato, were responsible for the marketing behind Sol beer in Cuba. In addition, Dibermex LLC shipped at least 8,368 cases of American Miller Lite beer to the island , according to import-export databases. 

Pepe Adato, as he calls himself online at 59 years old, has taken control of at least 11 other companies over the last two decades. He frequently travels to Cuba and Spain, and resides with his wife, María Begoña Arellano Mieres, in Supermanzana 500, a residential area of Cancún, the tourist mecca of the state of Quintana Roo, in Mexico. She, a graduate in Business Administration and Management, and Daniel Adato Arellano, one of his sons, have lent their names for the registration of these businesses, as directors or attorneys-in-fact. 

Adato’s father, who was also a businessman, lived in Cuba before settling permanently in Mexico. Mauricio Adato, a Jewish Turk, settled on the island at the end of the 50s of the last century. When the revolutionary government took power, Adato Sr. joined the Ministry of Industries, where he was the first delegate. This appointment as a representative of a state institution was only granted to people loyal to the newly established revolutionary regime. The delegates, Fidel Castro himself defined in a 1961 speech, constituted “the active and thinking core of the working class,” among whom there could be “no turncoat, no corrupt person, no give-up, no traitor, because no workplace "I would have admitted that an unworthy person represented him." 

However, Mauricio Adato left Cuba in the mid-60s and emigrated to the Aztec country. His four children were born there and he became a businessman. 

By the end of the 90s, two Adato family companies were already registered in the names of lawyers who served as their agents. Among these was Keydee Chaveli González Delgado, a Panamanian citizen who has since been at the service of the Adatos and other companies linked to Cuba. In 2020 she registered Al Caribe Sales SA , a store of the then emerging online commerce for sending parcels to the country from the Colón free zone, on the north-Caribbean front of Panama. 

Already mentioned, Interglobe Inc. (formerly Interglobe Trading Inc.) is the oldest company in this network, which José Israel Adato joined to eventually direct it. It was registered in 1984 in Canada, when the island was just opening up with suspicion to foreign investment. 

David Wilson

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