The Cuban government has been fooling U.S. sanctions by concealing the true nature of the company that handles money sent by Cuban-Americans to their families on the island, a Miami Herald investigation shows.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions in 2020 on the Cuban military, banning it from handling the remittances from the U.S., and the Biden administration has kept the sanctions in place. The Cuban government pretended to create a new company independent of the military to handle the millions of dollars sent yearly to the island through Western Union and Miami-based money-transfer agencies. But in reality, secret documents reviewed by the Herald show the new company has been controlled by the Cuban military all along.

Orbit S.A., the Cuban government company that currently handles remittances from the United States, was created by the Havana government after the Trump administration imposed sanctions on its predecessor, Fincimex, in 2020, because of its close ties to the Cuban military.

The U.S. policy aimed to punish Cuba’s armed forces for their violations of human rights on the island and their support for Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, while at the same trying to redirect foreign currency reaching the island to the private sector — and away from the military.

Remittances sent by Cuban Americans in the U.S to help their families on the island have for decades been a key source of foreign revenue for the Cuban military, which controls much of the island’s economy — from tourist hotels to gas stations to real estate — through a conglomerate known as GAESA, short for Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.

The Trump sanctions ended remittances to Cuba for two years, at least formally, until Cuba reassured the United States in 2022 that it had created the new remittances company, Orbit, with no ties to the armed forces.

On paper, Orbit is part of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment. But the documents reviewed by the Herald show that Orbit is, in reality, secretly run by another firm named Cimex — a key company under the military’s GAESA umbrella. The links are tight: Orbit is headed by Diana Rosa Rodríguez Pérez, a former executive vice president for GAESA.

The documents show that Cimex, which in turn oversees Fincimex, provides monthly detailed reports to higher-ups in GAESA of the money transfers processed by Orbit and regularly discusses the company’s performance with GAESA’s top executives.

The new revelations will likely bring new U.S. scrutiny to Western Union’s current deal with Orbit, and perhaps a new crackdown on remittances. The incoming Trump administration will be packed with Cuba hardliners like U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the nominee for secretary of state, who was one of the principal architects of the policy to put pressure on the Cuban military in the first place.

The embargo’s effect

The deal allowing Orbit to handle remittances was authorized by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2022 with the understanding that the Cuban company had no ties to the military. Other Miami-based remittance agencies, such as VaCuba and Cubamax, also have current contracts with Orbit.

Because of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, any financial dealings with the island that would normally be prohibited — such as money transfers — have to be licensed by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Western Union fully resumed money transfers to Cuba in March 2023. The company told the Miami Herald at the time that Orbit would act “as Western Union’s bank account payout processor in Cuba.”

Asked for response to the new information about Orbit’s links to the military, Western Union spokesperson Brad Jones said: “We will reserve comment at this time.”

VaCuba and Cubamax did not respond to requests for comment.

The Treasury and State departments did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

“It takes skill, determination and well-cultivated sources to uncover detrimental military and economic information relating to sanctions on Cuba, given the enormous efforts to conceal that information. Yet this is exactly the type of journalism that is essential to policymakers and the American people to strengthen our national security,” said U.S. Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Cuban American Republican who worked closely with Rubio to design Cuba policy during the first Trump administration.

“If these reports are true, they illustrate the importance of diligent, robust sanctions enforcement,” he said.

Díaz-Balart criticized the Biden administration for “weakening” sanctions on remittances and travel to Cuba while expanding dialogue and “other absurd exchanges between U.S. officials and Cuban operatives.”

“The contrast between the Trump and Biden-Harris Administrations on sanctions enforcement is clear, and I look forward to working with the incoming administration to support the Cuban people by denying resources to the brutal, anti-American dictatorship that oppresses them,” he added.

Secret documents

The revelations in this story are based on the Herald’s review of Cimex’s secret documents, on information provided by a source with knowledge of the companies’ internal dealings who asked not to be identified to avoid government retaliation, and on publicly available data.

Before the Trump-era sanctions, GAESA controlled remittances sent by Cubans abroad to their families on the island through services like Western Union. In order to operate on the island, Western Union and other companies were required by Cuban authorities to sign contracts with Financiera Cimex, or Fincimex, a Cimex subsidiary registered in Panama that provides financial services.

But in October 2020, Western Union was forced to shut down its offices in Cuba after the U.S. State Department added Fincimex to its list of restricted Cuban companies, shutting off the flow of dollars to the island. The list highlights companies linked to the Cuban military and bans U.S. nationals from doing business with them. Miami’s VaCuba and Cubamax canceled their remittance agreements with Fincimex as well.

GAESA, Cimex and Fincimex were also blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department. And the Trump administration reduced the amount of money that could be sent to the relatives on the island.

“We are working on further regulations that would further close any loopholes ... that the regime has had and used to manipulate the Cuban people and skim off every dollar that people attempt to send to their families,” a senior Trump administration official told the Herald at the time. “We are closing every door, every loophole.”

Large source of revenue

At the time, experts estimated that money sent by Cubans from abroad was the island’s second-largest source of foreign revenue, and that Western Union held a large chunk of that market. The country received an estimated $2 billion a year in remittances. That figure also included money sent through informal channels – for example, people known as mulas traveling to Cuba carrying cash – as well as the dollar value of food, medicines, clothes and other articles carried by travelers or sent in packages through agencies like VaCuba and Cubamax.

The money sent by Cubans in the U.S. and Cuban Americans is a lifeline to many families on the island, which is going through one of its worst economic crises in decades.

But remittances have also become a key source of dollars for Cuban military-owned companies, which not only take a fee for handling the transactions (in 2020 it was $1 for each $100 wired through Western Union) but, most critically, keep the dollars and instead give recipients on the island their equivalent in local currency.

GAESA keeps its money separate from the Cuban government’s budget, jealously guarding it from government auditors. For example, in May, Gladys Bejerano, the island’s general comptroller at the time, told the Spanish news agency EFE that she could not audit GAESA because it was not under her supervision. She was fired from the post shortly after without explanation.

Cuban official data show GAESA has used millions of dollars to build new hotels in recent years, despite the island’s worsening economic crisis and claims by the government that it does not have enough money to buy enough food and oil to feed the population and keep the lights on.

“It is a parallel economy,” the Herald source said about the GAESA funds.

Military refusal

After Trump sanctioned Fincimex and cut the cash flow, the military refused to move the remittance business to a non-military entity.

For over a year, Fincimex officials publicly insisted they were the only company with the knowledge and infrastructure to provide support to Western Union. After Trump left office, Cuban officials tried to press the Biden administration to remove the restrictions, arguing they were affecting Cuban families at a time of a global pandemic.

They also lied about Fincimex’s relationship to the military.

“Fincimex is a 100% civil entity. None of its workers are military. It is false that it is an entity belonging to the Armed Forces,” Fincimex’s general manager, Yamil Hernández González, told Cuban official news outlet Cubadebate in August 2021.

But a month earlier, on July 11, 2021, Cuban authorities arrested hundreds of anti-government protesters, effectively tying Biden’s hands on lifting sanctions on Cuba.

After watching the crackdown unfold, President Biden said he wanted to make sure that measures to help the Cuban people would not end up enriching the government.

“For example, the ability to send remittances back to Cuba. I would not do that now because of the fact it’s highly likely that the regime would confiscate those remittances or big chunks,” he said.

So the Cuban government, which has decades of experience skirting the U.S. embargo, came up with a simple ruse to evade the sanctions: it created Orbit, a new company almost identical to Fincimex and literally housed next door. The new company is on the same street in the Havana Miramar neighborhood and staffed with former Fincimex employees — but the government claimed it was free of ties to Fincimex and the military.

But Cimex documents from 2024 obtained by the Herald show that Fincimex keeps close tabs on all the money transfer orders, and their amounts, sent by Western Union, VaCuba, Cubamax and a few other companies to Orbit every month.

Executive summaries prepared by Cimex for meetings with GAESA’s executive president, labeled as “secret,” cite both Orbit and Fincimex data on remittances.

In a letter earlier this year from Cimex’s president, Col. Héctor Oroza Busutil, to the president of Cuba’s Central Bank, the army official complained about the low number of money-transfer orders sent to Orbit by Miami firm VaCuba. He asked her to meet with VaCuba officials to get answers and attached email correspondence between Orbit and VaCuba.

He couldn’t meet directly with VaCuba officials because Cimex is not supposed to oversee Orbit.

In January of this year, another incident revealed how closely Orbit is tied to Cimex.

Western Union remittance services to Cuba were suspended on Jan. 28, citing “technical difficulties” in Cuba. At about the same time, Cuban authorities reported a ”cybersecurity incident” that they said affected electronic systems used to sell gasoline at stations around the island. Cimex operates the country’s gas stations.

One of the secret documents discussing remittances that includes Orbit data confirms that it was “Cimex’s structure” that was taken down by the cybersecurity event in January and that the company lost $12 million in remittances that did not reach the island. The implication is that Orbit uses Cimex’s financial infrastructure to process remittances sent from the U.S. through Western Union.

Orbit’s new president

Far from being the independent company it claims to be, Orbit has been managed by Cimex executives since its creation.

Until the beginning of this year, Orbit was secretly run by Hernández González, Fincimex’s general manager, using other people as fronts, the Herald source said. At least one of Orbit’s former directors also came from another Cimex-run company, ECUSE.

At some point this year, Brig. Gen. Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera, the executive president of GAESA, named Rodríguez Pérez as Orbit’s president.

Rodríguez Pérez, a former Cimex vice president, had been Lastres’ right hand as vice executive president of GAESA, the Herald source said.

Before her top GAESA position, she had also been vice president of Cimex. Though much public information about Rodríguez Pérez has apparently been deleted from the internet to obscure her professional background, some publications that tie her to Cimex remain.

A December 2022 story by independent news outlet 14ymedio identified Rodríguez Pérez as Cimex’s vice president. The news outlet cites a Facebook publication by Cuban official television reporter Lázaro Manuel Alonso, who interviewed Rodríguez Pérez and two other Cimex officials at the company’s headquarters and published photos of the December 22, 2022 meeting.

Previously, she was the director of ECASOL, a GAESA company that imports cooking oil, until at least 2019, according to a Cuban business directory published by ProCuba, a center promoting foreign investment attached to the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment.

In November, Orbit’s account on Facebook published photos of Rodríguez Pérez at Orbit’s stand at the Havana International Fair. Annia Pérez Mederos, Orbit´s chief operations officer who was previously the business manager of Fincimex, according to a public document, also appears in some of the pictures.

Orbit’s new director is also seen wearing a pearl necklace and posing with the staff in front of the company’s headquarters in Miramar.

The caption reads: “ORBIT S.A Team. We orbit with companies from around the world for remittance services. Always at your service, with professionalism, security and excellence.”

©2024 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.