Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Callejas, Raul Castro’s son-in-law and the man behind the curtain running the day-to-day operations for Cuba’s communist dictatorship has died of a heart attack.
Revolutionary Armed Forces Division General Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Calleja, the head of the GAESA corporate conglomerate, passed away Friday morning from cardiac arrest, according to state-run media.
Lopez-Calleja was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and a member of the National Assembly of Popular Power.
Born in 1960 and the former son-in-law of General Raul Castro, he was a key figure in the Cuban government and commanded the powerful military consortium of the army, which controls a large part of the most important sectors of the island’s economy.
The state-run daily Granma reported that the high-rankinjg military official “had a treasure of brilliant service to the Homeland and to the Cuban revolution.”
His death creates a power vacuum and throws a huge wrench into succession of power in Cuba. We’ll have to wait and see which family member dictator Raul Castro chooses to replace him.
Death from any cause involves a cardiac arrest, since death automatically means the heart stops beating. In other words, saying somebody died from a cardiac arrest is not necessarily saying anything. It might mean he had a heart attack, but he could have died from any number of other causes. Keep that in mind.
And remember, this guy was supposed to be the brains of the outfit, certainly in terms of the economy–or rather, in terms of how the economy benefits the ruling class, which is what matters.