Fidel Castro’s son enjoying a millionaire vacation, while Cubans are starving

While Cuban workers have an average salary of $20 a month and cannot buy enough food to feed their families, Antonio Castro, one of the sons of former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, spent several weeks in June of 2015 cruising the Aegean Sea on his 160 foot yacht with a group of friends and several bodyguards.

The photos below were taken at a 5-star hotel in the city of Bodrum, Turkey, where Antonio Castro rented 5 suites for him and his friends, according to Turkish newspapers.

Castro arrived in Bodrum on his yacht, after spending a few days in the Greek island of Mykonos.

A few years ago, Forbes magazine estimated Fidel Castro’s fortune in at least 900 million dollars. Many of those who are familiar with the late dictator’s business believe that Forbes was too conservative.

Now his brother Raúl continues to run Cuba as if it was his own farm and the 11 million poor Cubans as his slaves. Castro’s businesses include the Convention Palace (Palacio de Convenciones); CIMEX; MEDICUBA; resort hotels and much more.

Fidel Castro Inc. – A Global Conglomerate, by Maria Werlau

Since 1997, Forbes magazine has featured Fidel Castro in its annual Billionaires‟ edition as one of the richest rulers in the world. Initially, Forbes assigned to Castro a share of Cuba’s reported GDP (gross domestic product) for the previous year, which yielded a fortune of approximately $150 million. Since 2003, however, it began using a method similar to that used to estimate the fortunes of business people and other royals and rulers. Using academic sources, Forbes identified several enterprises said to be controlled by Castro and determined their value by comparing them to similar publicly-traded companies. This has resulted in the more recent estimate of $500 million for Castro‟s fortune.

Aside from the difficulties inherent in estimating the value of privately-held companies lacking financial disclosure, Forbes‟ calculation of Fidel Castro‟s fortune is fraught with other obstacles. Due to a severe lack of information, the number of enterprises it took into account was very restricted in relation to the large number of businesses said to be under Castro‟s control. In addition, Forbes ‟calculation of Castro‟s net worth fails to take into account funds in bank accounts all over the world, large inventories of assets inside Cuba, and real estate holdings both in Cuba and overseas, all reported to belong to Castro. Yet, given the serious methodological flaws of Cuba‟s GDP statistics and Forbes‟ past practice of using only one year as the basis for its calculation, the new approach provides a sounder approximation to Castro‟s wealth. Although it probably falls well short of Castro‟s actual holdings, at least its foundation is the market value of clearly designated assets.

Not surprisingly, the Cuban government has long disputed Forbes ‟inclusion of Castro in their list. It publicly responded for the first time in 2004 by issuing a statement that “the revenues of Cuban state companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.” Fidel publicly rebuked Forbes report and said he was considering a lawsuit against the magazine for libel.

Because of the large, intricate, and secret nature of these business activities, expectedly, all estimates of Castro‟s worth are imprecise. Nonetheless, even the best attempts appear to be well shy of the vast wealth under his command. The testimonies of former regime insiders provide telling snapshots of the enormous assets that Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl control. Arguably, they offer damning substantiation of their existence, regardless of their precise value at any given time –which appears to fluctuate widely as substantial assets apparently flow in and out constantly.

Millionaire Castro even has his own bank!

The Cuban dictator spent more than six hours on TV accusing Forbes magazine of libel for saying that he is one of the world’s richest dictators with a fortune in excess of 900 million dollars.

Castro has been accused of murdering thousands of innocent Cubans; of betraying the ideals of the Cuban Revolution; of murdering many of those who helped him reach power; of keeping 11 million Cubans enslaved and many other crimes, but it seems that none of those accusations bother the Cuban dictator as much as Forbes saying that he is almost a billionaire, even though his salary is supposed to be around 700 Cuban pesos per month.

Manuel de Beunza, a defector who used to to handle the finances for the Ministry of the Interior when he was a top officer in Cuba’s intelligence services, told El Nuevo Herald on Sunday that Castro has a bank in the UK that is completely controlled by him.

The bank is Havin Bank LTD and used to be known as Havana International Bank LTD. De Baunza, who thinks that Castro’s fortune exceeds the $900 million reported by Forbes, told El Nuevo Herald that Cuba created 270 corporations around the world that report directly to Castro.

De Baunza, who was one of the sources used by Forbes, also said that in one occasion he personally gave two million dollars to Castro, through José ‘Chomy’ Millar Barruecos, a trusted aide to the Cuban dictator.

We did a search and found more information about Castro’s bank in the UK:

HAVIN BANK LTD, 30 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9TP, United Kingdom

Click here to see a map of where the bank is located.

Another of the analysts consulted by Forbes was Maria Werlau, who also believes that Castro’s fortune may be even larger than the 900 million estimated by Forbes. “Forbes’ estimate seems to be much lower than the vast economic resources that Castro personally controls,” she told El Nuevo Herald. “The cash that he may have in the network of bank accounts that he controls is practically impossible to estimate, because of how difficult it is to know what goes in and goes out of those accounts.” Maria wrote an extensive report for The Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) titled: “Fidel Castro Inc.: A Global Conglomerate”

This is why you should not do business with thieves

In the 1990s, Castro was desperately looking for foreign investors willing to enter into joint ventures with him, in order to bail out his sinking economy.

Many European investors, most of them from Spain, were more than willing to accept the invitation.

But that was before Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela and provided Castro with billions of dollars in free oil and many billions more in credits and other investments by PDVSA, the Venezuelan oil holding that Cháves used as if it was his own personal business.

Now, as reported in El Nuevo Herald, Castro wants to kick out the Spaniards and the other Europeans who were stupid enough to do business with him, but not before he steals their patents and their investments in Cuba, like he did 56 years ago when he stole all private businesses in the island.

Once again, Castro used and then betrayed those who tried to help him.

At least two powerful Spanish firms have sued the Cuban regime for violating the ” Accord for Reciprocal Protection of Investments” (APRI). The two companies, Acciones Infraestructura and Zell Chemie SL want Castro to pay what he owes them, before they agree to cancel their joint ventures.

Zell Chemie, a company that manufactures insecticides and materials that have to do with cleaning the environment, has been the main supplier of products to the Ministry of Public Health. Zell Chemie has also provided the financing for these transactions. For the last eight years, almost all the insecticides sold in Cuba have been manufactured by this company. A source inside Castro’s Ministry for Foreign Investments and Economic Collaboration told El Nuevo that Zell Chemie is accusing Castro of stealing its technology and the intellectual property that the firm had provided to the joint venture company, Zell Zanid S.A., in violation of the agreement that they made at the beginning of their partnership.

“We have presented our demands to APRI and are awaiting a response from the Cuban government that would be satisfactory to both sides,” an executive from Zell Chemi in Valencia Spain told El Nuevo Herald.

The executive didn’t want to get into the details of the argument.

Zell Chemie and a company owned by the Castro regime, Inversiones Gamma, signed a 50 – 50 joint venture agreement in 1999 that was supposed to last for 10 years. According to documents obtained by El Nuevo, the Spanish firm is owed $1.5 million and is asking for $3 million as indemnification for terminating the agreement.

If an agreement is not reached, Zell Chemie plans to take its demand to the International Arbitrage Court in Paris, in which case the amount that is asking could go as high as $5 million.

In the other case involving Acciones Infraestructura, the company also went to APRI and the Cuban regime agreed in June to pay the company $3 million for breaking their agreement. The Spanish company is now trying to collect, but so far no payment has been made.