Alexandre Corona joins the long list of senior Cuban officials who leave their duties in 2024, since the dismissal of Alejandro Gil Fernández as Minister of Economy
14ymedio, Madrid, 24 April 2024 — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel approved on Wednesday the dismissal of the governor of Cienfuegos, Alexandre Corona, who requested his resignation “upon recognizing mistakes made in the exercise of his responsibility.” According to a brief statement made public by the official press, which does not detail what the mistakes are, he will be replaced until a new governor is elected by Yolexis Rodríguez Armada, who was up to now a provincial deputy governor.
It is a case, therefore, different from the recent “movements of cadres,” such as the governors of Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Matanzas, Villa Clara and Ciego de Ávila. All of them were “liberated” from their posts to perform “new tasks,” according to the prose used by the regime in these circumstances. In recent weeks, the president of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), a union organization in the orbit of the Communist Party of Cuba, was also replaced.
Corona joins, of course, the long list of senior Cuban officials who leave their duties in 2024, since the dismissal of Alejandro Gil Fernández as Minister of Economy.
The expression used to communicate Corona’s departure is very similar to the one used when reporting the arrest of Gil Fernández, who is still under “rigorous investigation”
In fact, the expression used to communicate the departure of Corona is very similar to the one used when reporting the arrest of Gil Fernández, who is still under “rigorous investigation” today for “serious mistakes made in the performance of his duties.”
From her home in the Canary Islands, María Victoria Gil told 14ymedio a month ago that her brother, Gil Fernández, the former Minister of Economy and right-hand man of Miguel Díaz-Canel, was being held incommunicado in “some detention house of the Ministry of the Interior.”
President Díaz-Canel has reiterated in recent months the Government’s “zero tolerance” for economic crimes, and the Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, quoted in official media, has asked for “a tougher hand” in the face of “weakness, the lack of urgency and poor control” in the state sector.
Last March, the YouTube channel Molinos por la Libertad denounced Alexandre Corona for leading a corruption plot that also involved “heads of the Ministry of the Interior, provincial and military counterintelligence leaders” and even “the Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero and Díaz-Canel himself.”
According to this video, the governor, a former Ministry of Interior intelligence officer expelled for corruption in 1998, owned several small businesses, such as ConstruSur, which diverted resources that he himself authorized to build social housing. However, the Government never responded to these accusations.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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