There is a vein of nickel running beneath the red hills of Moa, in the far east of Oriente province, that has outlasted almost everything the twentieth century threw at it. It outlasted the American companies that first mapped it. It outlasted the revolution that nationalized those companies in the name of the Cuban people. It outlasted the Soviet engineers who came to process the ore and then went home. It outlasted the Canadian company, Sherritt International, that arrived in 1994 and for three decades refined the laterite ore into nickel and cobalt through a joint venture with the Cuban state, wiring royalties into Havana and absorbing the political risk that kept everyone else at bay. The vein is still there. What has changed, in the last three weeks, is who may soon own the right to profit from it.
On May 20, Sherritt announced it had entered a non-binding term sheet with Gillon Capital LLC, a family office controlled by the Washburne family of Texas, under which Gillon would acquire a warrant exercisable for up to 55 percent of Sherritt's shares — a controlling stake, at a price expected to be set at a discount to the company's mid-May trading price. The timing was not coincidental. A week earlier, Sherritt had suspended its direct participation in the Moa joint venture after the Trump administration, through Executive Order 14404 signed on May 1, designated Cuban military conglomerate GAESA and a cascade of related entities as Specially Designated Nationals, exposing any foreign company transacting with them to secondary sanctions risk. Cuba's nickel sector had just been rendered, in the language of compliance attorneys, radioactive. And yet rather than simply exiting, Sherritt found a buyer with a singular advantage: the Washburne family, through Gillon Capital, came with what amounted to a pre-clearance letter. The State Department and Treasury told Sherritt in writing that they did not object to Gillon's engagement in negotiations and, based on information provided to date, did not consider such talks contrary to U.S. law.
Ray Washburne ran the Overseas Private Investment Corporation under Trump from 2017 to 2019, later served on the president's intelligence advisory board, and was vice chairman of the Trump Victory Committee in 2016. The man positioned to acquire a majority interest in Cuba's most strategically significant mineral operation — nickel, cobalt, the raw materials of batteries and aerospace alloys — is a veteran Republican fundraiser whose family office arrived, letter of non-objection in hand, the moment sanctions pressure forced a Canadian rival to the table.
This is the detail the wire copy buries in the fourth paragraph. It is also the entire story.
To understand what is happening in Moa, you have to understand what ICAP was and why Washington sanctioned it on June 4 alongside Díaz-Canel's wife, his stepson, MINFAR, and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. The Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, founded by Fidel Castro in 1960, was in the State Department's designation language a support apparatus for Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence — a soft-power arm that hosted foreign delegations, cultivated solidarity networks, and moved money and influence across borders with the warm handshake of "friendship." For sixty-six years the CDRs watched the neighborhood; ICAP watched the world. The June 4 package designated five entities and five individuals, dismantling — on paper at least — the connective tissue of the regime's international infrastructure. The same executive order framework, E.O. 14404, that killed ICAP also killed Sherritt's ability to do business with the Cuban state without exposure to catastrophic compliance risk. The two things are not coincidental. They are the same lever, pulled for different purposes along the same fulcrum.
Here it is worth pausing, because the easy reading invites exactly the kind of moral clarity that tends to dissolve on contact with actual events. There is a genuine case that the sanctions architecture is doing what its architects intended: not merely punishing the regime but rewiring Cuba's extractive economy so that its resources flow toward actors aligned with Washington rather than toward a military apparatus that has held 11 million people in a state of managed scarcity for six decades. If a Trump-connected U.S. investor eventually operates the Moa nickel plant, the revenues no longer subsidize MINFAR and no longer flow through GAESA. That is not a trivial distinction. Critics of maximalist pressure on Cuba tend to focus on the humanitarian toll — and the toll is real, with infant mortality rising, hospitals stripped of medicines, and food production gutted — but the argument that the status quo of foreign-company revenue-sharing with the Cuban military was morally superior to the current disruption is harder to sustain than it first appears. Sherritt was, for thirty-two years, a revenue partner of the state that built the CDRs.
The deeper irony is historical. The window that briefly opened between December 2014 and January 2017 — the Obama-Castro rapprochement, the restored embassies, the chartered flights, the cautious foreign investment inquiries — was predicated on the belief that engagement would gradually disaggregate the Cuban economy, drawing private actors and civil society away from military control. That window closed with a finality that this publication noted in real time. What is unfolding now is not that window reopening; it is something structurally different and far less reversible. Rather than disaggregating the economy through gradual commercial liberalization, Washington is disaggregating it through force — through designation lists and compliance risk — and then, in at least this one documented instance, redirecting the extracted asset toward a single politically pre-approved American acquirer. The Obama model said: let many flowers bloom, and some will be Cuban. The current model says: let one frost kill everything, and we'll decide who replants.
Sherritt has a 32-year presence on the island and, until very recently, had been attempting to dissolve the Moa joint venture entirely before reversing course and finding Gillon Capital instead. The deal remains non-binding, subject to regulatory approvals including the Toronto Stock Exchange, and the State and Treasury Departments have stressed that any final transaction would require their formal sign-off. There is every possibility this never closes. But the architecture of the moment — the E.O., the designation, the suspension, the non-objection letter, the discounted warrant — is now visible, and it tells you something about the shape of what comes after the revolution, if the revolution ends. The nickel will still be there. The question is whose flag flies above the processing plant.
That is what the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution were always afraid of. They called it imperialism. They were not entirely wrong about the mechanics, only about the cure.
The ore in the red hills of Moa has waited sixty-seven years. It can afford to wait a little longer to see who arrives with the deed.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Business.
