My daughter recently traveled to rural Cuba with suitcases full of items the poor Cubans, she was to stay with, had requested. She became friendly and kept in contact with the female Cuban doctor, a specialist in gastroenterology, who was her interpreter. The doctor has a child with brain cancer, and the hospital conditions recently shown on 60 Minutes correspond with what she learned from her doctor friend. When the doctor worked, she was paid $30 per month, but recently, with electricity unavailable across Cuba, she is unemployed.
With my daughter’s personal recent experience in mind, I watched with great interest two Sunday’s ago the 20-minute segment on 60 Minutes entitled “Cuba in Crisis”, narrated by their new correspondent, Matt Gutman. 60 Minutes featured a sick infant dying in a poorly equipped Cuban hospital, with inadequate electricity and a shortage of medicines. The complete headline on the segment on the 60 Minutes website was: “Cuban doctors confront medical and supply shortages along with power outages amid ongoing U.S. sanctions”, and in it featured Gutman’s interview with Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío.
The Deputy Foreign Minister blamed Cuba’s problems on U.S. sanctions. The discussion ended as follows:
Matt Gutman: Do you think that’s going to happen?
Carlos Fernández de Cossío: We see no reason for is the U.S. government to continue to punish the whole population of a country. How long is that sustainable? How acceptable is that? Just because power exists in the hands of the United States. Does everybody have to bend to that?
The Cuba segment then concluded with Gutman following up on the condition of the sick infant – who had died – presumably because of U.S. sanctions!
Somehow, Mr. Gutman failed to follow up in the above interview on the key question: “Why doesn’t GAESA, short for Grupo de Administración Empresarial, that controls 40–70% of Cuba’s economy, with revenues reportedly 3.2 times greater than the Cuban state budget and liquid dollar reserves between $9 billion and $14.5 billion, its operations generate roughly 37% of Cuba’s GDP, use some of that money to equip their hospitals?”
GAESA, short for Grupo de Administración Empresarial, is a sprawling conglomerate of businesses owned and operated by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Established in the 1990s by then-defense minister Raúl Castro during Cuba’s Special Period, GAESA was designed to provide the military with a financial foundation amid economic collapse following the Soviet Union’s dissolution. It functions as a parallel economic and financial structure, largely independent of government oversight, and is often described as a “State within the State.
Was the elite research staff at 60 Minutes unaware of GAESA, which I found with less than fifteen minutes on the Internet? I quickly found a Columbia Law School study on GAESA dated December 19, 2025, by Pavel Vidal, entitled: ‘GAESA, the Invisible Elephant in Cuba’s Macroeconomic Stabilization”. See: GAESA, the Invisible Elephant in Cuba’s Macroeconomic Stabilization | Cuba Capacity Building Project
I knew of the structure of corruption in Cuba; I just had to find the name of Castro Cuba’s corrupt communist State organization that was stealing the livelihoods of the 11 million Cuban citizens who do not have the means to escape their beautiful island.
Kudos to 60 Minutes for their latest cover-up of Inconvenient Truths that conflict with the ideologies they promote to their rapidly diminishing audience!
For the first time in my adult lifetime, a major U.S. political party has opened its party to avowed Socialists and Communist candidates, who want communism implemented in the United States. Do Democratic Party leaders, who will soon take control of the U.S. Congress with their new friends, not know what is going on in Communist Cuba that is only 90 miles off our southern shores?
Past and present Democratic Party officials have endorsed and campaigned for communist/socialist newcomers now among them, even when in the party primaries, they defeated long-time Democrat stalwarts! Is New York City to become the new American Havana?
TW3
November 12, 2026
John Whitmore Jenkins
