Prosecutors are seeking long-term prison sentences for an ex-minister and a Chilean businessman, after a provincial court in Havana found them guilty in a corruption case apparently designed to show the limits of translating power and influence into business in Raulista Cuba.
A long-term sentence for Alejandro Roca Iglesias, 75, who was minister of food industries from 1976 to March 2009, would send a strong signal to Cuban officials with material ambitions. Max Marambio was absent, fighting the court proceedings from Chile; he was represented by a court-appointed defender.
If prosecutors have their way, Roca will get 15 years of prison, while Max Marambio, 63, former part-owner of the Alimentos Río Zaza joint venture, would get 20 years, offical daily Granma reported. The court ruled that Roca was guilty of bribery and “acts harming economic activity or commerce,” and Marambio of bribery and falsification of business documents, according to the Communist Party newspaper. Initially, Marambio was also accused of fraud and embezzlement. Sentencing is expected “in the coming days.”
The brief Granma news item didn’t provide any details about the case. According to rumors, Roca made considerable bank deposits abroad from illicit commissions. A son of Roca’s works for Marambio in Chile.
The government shut down Río Zaza, which produced and sold processed food products in Cuba to the tune of $100 million a year, early last year and took back Marambio’s house in Havana. As of October, two Río Zaza executives were imprisoned in relation to the investigation, according to Marambio, but the government hasn’t released any information regarding other pending cases.
A Havana court indicted Marambio in May 2010, after a one-year investigation. The governments’ efforts to get Marambio to appear before a court have been published by official media, but this is the first time official media mentioned Roca’s case.
The Chilean businessman, a political insider in Cuba during the 1970s and 80s, has not returned to the island since fall 2009. He filed legal proceedings against Cuba before the court of arbitration of the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in October 2010.
“The central objective of this legal action is the unrestricted defense of my honor, that of my collaborators, and of all people who have cooperated with, and trusted in, the entrepreneurial project Río Zaza,” Max Marambio wrote in a press release about his ICC case in October. He explained the ICC was the forum for disputes indicated by the Cuban government to foreign investors, adding that the ICC offers the necessary neutrality to “fight a conflict built on unfounded and libelous accusations.”
Marambio claims that part of the accusations stem from his paying generous benefits to Cuban employees.
Shortly after he filed the ICC case, the government asked Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant for Max Marambio. It also published a summons for Marcel Luis Marambio, Max’s younger brother and a vice president of the holding company that controlled Río Zaza.
“I will go through this process with serenity, prudence and firmness,” Marambio said in the October press release. “I will do this maintaining the same feelings of admiration and respect towards what has been the Cuban Revolution, with the certainty that the truth is always revolutionary and always ends up winning, if it is defended with solidity and conviction.”
Marambio is one of the few foreigners who made it into Cuba’s inner circles of power under Fidel Castro. Since the 1990s Marambio, a former student leader in Chile, body guard of President Salvador Allende, member of Cuba’s special forces, and founding chief executive of the Cimex holding — today Cuba’s largest business conglomerate — used his close relationship with the Cuban government to build a thriving business.
Roca lost his long-term post in March 2009, the same time as Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque and Vice President Carlos Lage, both of whom had been close to Fidel Castro.
