Alfonso Larrea: From Being Agent “David” to Being the Forefront for MIPYMES

To leave the Country, the Constant Advice

Suspicions against Larrea increased because he was very insistent on encouraging other opponents to leave the country. Both Fornaris and Mario Viera assert that Larrea constantlyly emphasized to them that the best option was to leave Cuba. To Viera, the person who introduced him to the opposition, Larrea proposed the following plan:

“He talked to me about a group of soldiers who were going to desert with very important documents and would leave in a boat for Miami. Alfonso [Larrea] was supposedly going to help them by stealing an engine from the warehouse where he worked. He invited me to join them. Honestly, at that time, I thought it was naïve of him.”

Viera had a pending case for attempting to leave the country illegally. If caught committing the same offence again, he would be immediately sent to prison. Moreover, as the proposal seemed somewhat far-fetched to him, he declined Larrea’s offer.

“I was imprisoned for a year in 1991 and when I got out, Alfonso had gained renown within the opposition. He was constantly at the United States Interests Section in Havana. He even took me with him once, and I could see how close he was to some U.S. officials and how they listened to him,” recalls Viera.

This opposition activist, now exiled in the United States, narrates that he decided to distance himself from Larrea when he confirmed that Larrea, while active in CUN, was also active in the UJC and had not lost his job with a foreign company, an especially attractive position. “What opponent who rubs shoulders with the Interests Section is allowed to work in Cuba, let alone in something important?” reflects Viera.

It is common in the island for simple employees to be fired if they openly criticize the government and for opposition activists to be prevented from accessing many jobs.

Regarding being hired by foreign companies, this is done through the State, which filters who gets the job. A dissident who visited SINA and was active in CUN would not be suitable for the job Larrea had. Unless he was not really an opposition activist.

On the island, people who help or are part of State Security can be divided into three fundamental categories: the agents themselves; collaborators who act out of ideological conviction, also called “trusted persons”; and collaborators who do so for some personal, material interest, fear, or blackmail.

The most significant tasks, such as infiltrating opposition groups, are usually the responsibility of the first group, i.e., the agents.

“An agent is a person who has been recruited, who has a file, with official training to do this type of work. He is an undercover officer,” explains a former counterintelligence worker we consulted.

The source, who knows Larrea, describes him as “an ideological agent” who “acted out of conviction.”

After the trial against Chaviano, the opposition activists that we consulted lost track of agent “David.” According to the sources interviewed, Larrea not only stopped visiting the U.S. diplomatic headquarters but also changed jobs.

From agent to entrepreneur

With his law degree in hand, Larrea went through a variety of occupations, mostly in ministries in commercial advisory positions, as detailed in his LinkedIn profile.

He first was at the news agency Prensa Latina, where he stayed until 1998. From there, he landed as a commercial specialist in the Wajay Free Zone. After about five years, he moved to the Ministry of the Fishing Industry. And in 2007, he was appointed a specialist at the Martí Program Office, part of the Council of State, Cuba’s highest governing body. His last job was in the Ministry of Culture.

This information, published by Larrea himself, could not be fully corroborated with the interviewed agents who knew him. But they do affirm that he remained in state outfits, without breaking his ties with State Security.

This is not unusual. Some agents are assigned to institutions outside the Security organs, but from their new positions, they continue to collaborate with the political police.

Larrea’s public life as a private entrepreneur begins as the restoration of relations between Cuba and the United States approached, during the second term of President Barack Obama, at the beginning of the last decade.

A faint support for private initiative was the goodwill gesture that Raul Castro’s administration could display as a sign of opening up. As is the case today with the presidency of Joe Biden, the private sector was the card Cuba brought to the table to convince Americans that the country was really changing.

And indeed, some transformations were seen: in the main cities of the country, restaurants, bars, gift shops, technological ventures opened… Cuba became fashionable abroad and restrictions for American tourism who had begun to arrive, were eased.

This was partly possible because the regime legalized the initial forms of private enterprise: the so-called non-agricultural cooperatives, which were approved at the end of 2012. In these spaces, private individuals, known as self-employed workers, could join and offer joint services.

One of these cooperatives, probably the best known, was Scenius, which focused on providing accounting advisory services.

In January 2015, months after Raúl Castro announced on television that the “Cold War” had ended, Scenius came to life and didn’t stop growing.

Its services included drafting financial statements, bookkeeping, inventory control, or tax advice to companies

Everywhere, people talked about the cooperative of private individuals that was being successful within the limited and battered Cuban state economy. The international press cataloged it as a “leader” in this sector, and in addition to the capital, they expanded to Matanzas and Camagüey. They had achieved the unthinkable. They were praised for how far they had come.

An initiative of three partners with an initial capital of 300 dollars managed to invoice more than two million dollars and employ about 300 workers, as Larrea himself explained to the press.

However, behind this success story was a paradox. The cooperative did not prosper by providing services to the private sector. Scenius did not focus on the sectors that emerged with the thaw, the sectors that attracted self-employed workers: tourism or restoration. Most of the clients to whom Scenius provided accounting services, about 90 percent, were state enterprises, as Larrea himself detailed.

What he never explained was how they obtained such a broad portfolio of government-dependent clients, being such a young private company that no one knew.

As the cooperative became a benchmark, two of its founders gained some fame. The president of Scenius, Luis Alberto Dueñas, was a professional engineer who had worked as a merchant marine and who, along with Larrea, set up the venture.

Although he did not reach Larrea’s visibility, Dueñas also gave interviews to the foreign press. In one of them, he warned foreign businessmen with interests in Cuba that the economic opening was not going to mean “filling the country with McDonald’s.” Dueñas made it clear that entrepreneurs like him worked under the rules of socialism and were “graduates of the Revolution.” Therefore, they would not allow foreigners to impose unrelated political interests on them. He also described the government’s performance in the face of the thaw as “quick,” but “cautious” and “efficient.”

Alongside Dueñas, Larrea was also a highly quoted voice on the matter. He was the subject of articles in both the independent and the official press, led workshops, provided consultancies, even traveled to the United States. Without a doubt, he was one of the men of the moment for the private sector.

The end of Scenius

Everything at Scenius seemed to be going well until the context changed radically. The thaw slowed down after the attacks of unknown origin that the staff of the US embassy in Havana suffered starting in 2016. By then, the regime was already obstructing the development of self-employment and cooperatives; as a result of these measures, about 80,000 people gave up their self-employment licenses.

This was compounded by the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House in 2017. The former president, a Republican, reversed the policy towards Cuba: he restricted travel to the island, tightened sanctions, and targeted the country’s most important business group, owned by the Cuban military, GAESA.

It was in this context that the Cuban authorities decided to put the brakes on Scenius, to end the fairy tale.

On August 7, 2017, the state portal Cubadebate officially announced that Scenius had been dissolved for alleged violations committed by the cooperative. According to them, Scenius had provided services not contemplated under its license. For example, they prepared cost sheets for their clients, which is an accounting service, but was not included under the license.

To this day, we do not know why Scenius fell from grace, nor why the process of economic reforms was stopped. For some observers, these changes ceased to be of interest to the regime when they were no longer useful in obtaining concessions from the United States. For others, the closure of Scenius and, in general, the brake on private initiative, were symptoms of the internal disputes within the regime between more reformist sectors and more orthodox ones.

In this context, economist Emilio Morales, who has researched the Cuban private sector for years, believes that the thaw and economic opening produced fear of a loss of control among some powerful military figures. “To General (Luis Alberto Rodríguez) López-Calleja, then CEO of GAESA, a sweeping movement of independent entrepreneurs, with greater business power and greater financial autonomy, was inconvenient because it would prevent the supremacy of the Army’s conglomerate and would cut off its billion-dollar revenues in dollars,” Morales thinks.

Regarding the shutdown of his business, Larrea himself wrote a public letter criticizing the decision and arguing that the alleged breaches were false. He even suggested that it was a reprisal. He said that the real reasons for closing the company were different and that he was going to explain them. He never did.

After the shutdown of Scenius, the entrepreneur generated more public interest and occupied headlines that presented him as a kind of “reformist” whom the regime, or at least a part of it, had wanted to remove from the game.

On the same day, August 7, 2017, that the closure of Scenius was announced, Larrea published the first of six texts in the independent medium El Toque on how cooperatives were seen as enemies of the state sector.

But the closure of Scenius increased his presence not only in the media but also in receptions held at the US embassy in Cuba. He had gone from being one of the entrepreneurs of the moment to being a victim of regime repression.

“After the shutdown of the cooperative, Larrea became more famous and attended every event that was held at the Embassy. He was invited more frequently, I suppose because of the notoriety he had. He became a martyr of self-employment,” comments an independent journalist who at that time coincided with him at many events of the US diplomatic mission.

In 2019, the entrepreneur signed his last article in El Toque, asking to let cooperatives work. That would be one of his last public appearances to date.

The return as a MIPYME Owner

On January 20, 2021, Biden became President of the United States, and with him, the Democratic Party returned to the White House. Trump’s failure to be re-elected was good news for the Havana dictatorship, which had seen how the now former president promised a tougher stance against Castroism if he were to win a second term.

In contrast, with Biden, who had been part of the thaw as Obama’s vice president, the outlook was more encouraging. And the regime desperately needed a break.

Cuba was going through a severe economic crisis, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. The collapse of tourism, the country’s main industry, had led to a series of unpopular measures aimed at dollarizing the economy and cleaning up finances. And, partly in response to these measures, on July 11, 2021, for the first time since 1959, people across the country took to the streets to protest, which in turn unleashed a wave of historic repression.

Thus, in need of boosting the economy, improving its image, and with a new tenant in the White House, the regime began to show signs of economic opening.

Months after Biden’s rise to power, the Cuban authorities introduced a legal form that allowed individuals to create a private company. This time they did not talk about cooperatives as during Obama’s thaw, but about MIPYMES.

The United States has demanded the empowerment of the Cuban private sector and tried to make its sanctions more selective to affect state enterprises, but not private businesses.

In this way, MIPYMES, in addition to being a nod to the historical enemy, were also a response to the popular protests of July 11, 2021; just as the opening in the 90s was to the Maleconazo of 1994.

“Openings in Cuba start with internal crises when the water goes up to your nose. Then, these reforms are packaged in a propaganda campaign that promises changes and sells them abroad. It’s a way to seek additional benefits from something you had to do because your internal actors forced you,” states Cuban historian and analyst Juan Antonio Blanco.

This is how Larrea returned with a new business. Although the authorities had arbitrarily closed his previous venture, he did not hesitate to venture again into creating a private company in Cuba.

Evexcon, Larrea’s new business, is company number 72 on the official list of MIPYMES. And as happened with Scenius, Evexcon, again, has had the constant accompaniment of official media, which has highlighted its management as an organizer of events for MIPYMES.

For example, in November 2021, the website of Radio Taíno dedicated a note to promoting the first Evexcon workshop, just a month after the announcement of the creation of the first MIPYMES. A year later, Prensa Latina agency dedicated a couple of notes to promote said company and its events in the Dominican Republic, trying to connect the Cuban private sector with international companies.

Precisely, Larrea’s business model is that which official media highlight. Evexcon exists to place members of the Cuban private sector in common spaces to encourage alliances and possible businesses.

Larrea’s company organizes networking events at the Havana bar 2.45, owned by the famous athlete Javier Sotomayor. Interested parties pay just 200 Cuban pesos (less than a dollar) and have access to the event.

2.45 is a venue that other entrepreneurs close to the regime have used for similar purposes, including Hugo Cancio to promote Katapulk and his new food brand.