Cuba: History and inventory
First published in Spanish at La Cosa. Translation by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
History is one thing; an inventory is another. If 1959 was history, 2026 seems like an inventory. The package of 176 measures across 23 areas presented to the National Assembly on June 18 represents the most significant market-oriented reform since 1959. More than 148 legal provisions are affected, leaving almost no sector of the economy untouched.
Many of these measures have been demanded by a broad spectrum of people for a long time, including: decentralisation, ending the dual currency system, small-scale land ownership, markets, and municipal autonomy. What follows is not an argument against them, but an examination of their impacts.
First, a simple textual analysis of the document, presented as a “sovereign exercise to preserve the Revolution’s achievements without renouncing socialism.”
The word “worker” does not appear in the document’s 23 key sections. “Trade union” appears once, solely to cap wages at a company’s “economic and financial capacity.” “Socialism” is relegated to rhetoric; in the technical measures, it survives as a label, “Socialist State Enterprise”, which the document orders be “transformed … into a joint-stock company.” The signifier remains, but the significate changes.
The significate taking its place has a name, though it is not used in the document: structural adjustment, albeit a heterodox one. Its key measures — price liberalisation, private banking, VAT [Value Added Tax], successive devaluations accompanied by liquidating companies that “cannot withstand” the adjustment, eliminating universal subsidies and unrestricted openness to foreign investment — are normally recommended by global financial institutions’ stabilisation programs.
The stated difference lies in the pace and nominal retention of state ownership over “fundamental” sectors, a category the document does not define. It does, however, define the mechanism for their transfer: separating ownership (which remains “social”) from management (which becomes “non-state”). In practice, this is similar to how China and Vietnam enabled private accumulation within formal public structures.
“Market” appears about 20 times. Beyond the finer detail, the social safeguards accompanying it — a fund started with “a portion” of the savings from scrapping subsidies, social responsibility delegated to the private sector, and three-to-six months’ wages severance pay — present, once again, a sequencing problem: scrapping energy and transport subsidies will trigger immediate inflation, eroding the Fund before it even becomes operational.
There are three hypothetical paths from here.
The first is a “renewal” of socialism, ideally with workers’ control, as demanded by Marxist left sectors. In the 1970s and ’80s, Cuba achieved health and education indicators far above its income level. It sent troops to Angola and Cuito Cuanavale, helping militarily defeat Apartheid. [South African anti-Apartheid leader] Nelson Mandela said “the decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces [in Angola] destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor”, travelling to the island in 1991 to express his gratitude in person. This is part of Cuban socialism’s legacy; workers’ control in Cuba, however, is a fantasy.
The left had a real working-class base before 1959: anarcho-syndicalism dominated the labour movement until the 1920s; Communists, Trotskyists and the PSP [Popular Socialist Party] later supported trade unions and strikes. After the 1960s, state socialism triumphed — with top-down planning, centralised power, and limited self-organisation. When the party hierarchy reorganises rather than collapses, workers’ control is not the outcome; instead, administrative power is converted into ownership.
The second possible path is a negotiated transition from above: regime elites negotiating with economic groups that have emerged under their wing, with a gradual opening rather than a rupture. Other post-Communist transitions show that the model’s limits is that without political reform, the opening inevitably stalls or is reversed.
Cuba also has a specific flaw that often accompanies these processes: corruption. Former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy Alejandro Gil Fernández was dismissed in February 2024 for “serious errors”. He was investigated for espionage, embezzlement, bribery, money laundering and influence peddling. With leaks of this magnitude, the question is not whether the pact will hold, but on which side loyalties lie.
The third hypothetical scenario is transitioning towards subordination to Washington. Cuba is not Venezuela — it does not as much oil nor comparable armed forces — but the blockade, the cutting off of fuel imports since January, the US charges against Raúl Castro and sanctions on Gaesa [a Cuban conglomerate owned by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces] means the US is pushing Cuba towards subordination.
Venezuela provided the blueprint: regime change did not improve wages or resolve the electricity crisis; instead, the immediate changes were to laws, with hydrocarbon and mining reforms opening them up to foreign capital — formalising an “economy of plunder and dispossession,” according to sociologist Emiliano Terán Mantovani. Gaesa, Cuba’s ports and nickel are the Cuban hub of this hemispheric operation.
The three paths share a common foundation: the document creates the conditions for private economic actors with their own interests, whose representation the one-party system cannot accommodate without transforming itself. The implicit pact is a developmental authoritarianism — economic freedom in exchange for political obedience.
Cuba President Miguel Díaz-Canel said as much, perhaps unintentionally: “Without wealth, there is nothing to distribute … If there is no wealth, there is no social justice, and everything else is a fairy tale.” Subordinating social justice to wealth production has been a liberal capitalist tenet for two centuries. That this is presented as the foundation of Cuban socialism in 2026 is not a contradiction in discourse; it runs right through the document.
Behind these scenarios lies an older problem: a democratic political economy demands two things Cuba has failed to combine: political inclusion and the state’s real capacity to accumulate wealth in order to distribute social rights. Cuba has tried three different ways of failing on both counts in its past three constitutions.
The 1940 Constitution promised social democracy without a state capable of delivering it: of the 70 complementary laws enacted, only 10 were passed in a decade. It fostered political inclusion but not the promised effective redistribution (the 1952 coup also stifled that possibility).
The 1976 Constitution built up distributive capacities — health, education, social security — but on the basis of the single party as the “supreme leading force”: it generated redistribution but institutionalised political exclusion. Although it was announced in 2018 that PCC [Cuban Communist Party] membership would no longer be a prerequisite for holding political office, the party and its youth wing account for 14% of the electoral roll but 95% of MPs.
The 2019 Constitution recognised private property and the market without the political rights to make decisions on these, without effective tax mechanisms to tie them to redistribution, and without an accumulation model — involving state-owned and private enterprises as well as foreign investment — capable of converting them into a source of social rights. More than five years after it came into effect, Cuban courts still do not recognise its direct legal force — “exactly as happened with its predecessor,” according to José Walter Mondelo García and Julio César Guanche Zaldívar — with only two of more than 140 applications filed for constitutional protection being accepted for consideration.
Today’s expanding market does not redistribute: it concentrates. In the first quarter of 2021, more than half of all state investment went into tourism and property, but barely 1% to innovation. The reform document makes no mention of poverty or inequality: it calls them “multidimensional vulnerability” and delegates their resolution to economic actors — both state and private — “as part of their social responsibility at the community level.”
This exclusion is compounded by others. Unpaid care work continues to fall disproportionately on women: almost one in two Cuban women of working age are outside the formal labour force, and although there are more women with university degrees, they have less economic autonomy and are under-represented in better-paid sectors. The 23 pillars say nothing about this; they delegate it, like other social safeguards, as a voluntary responsibility of businesses and communities.
Racial stratification persists in wealth, symbolic recognition and institutional power. Given Cuba’s migration history, the diaspora of remittances and capital for new private businesses is disproportionately white. An open market that fails to address these exclusions does not redistribute wealth: it simply adds layers to existing inequality.
None of this is occurring in isolation. The world in which Cuba is negotiating its opening is one where neo-fascism is becoming institutionalised through elected governments, racism is again state policy and extreme inequality is celebrated as a merit. Cuba is part of this landscape, not its centre. Neither is its socialism the redeeming exception it is sometimes portrayed as, nor could its eventual recolonisation be considered separately to what is occurring to much of Latin America.
The reforms are long overdue. The window of opportunity that Cuban socialism enjoyed after 1959 was squandered through procrastination, stagnation and persecution of all independent organisations. [The crackdown on protests on] July 11, 2021, confirmed that many Cubans see the revolution’s social contract as broken. Society reached this point disempowered, without its own political organisation and unable to endure more hardship.
The suffocating situation is reflected in other figures: infant mortality rose from 4.0 to 9.9 per thousand live births between 2018–25; childhood cancer survival rates fell from 85% to 65% due to a lack of cytostatic drugs; more than 12,000 children are awaiting surgery without supplies; and more than half of essential medicines are in short supply. This suffering, with its own history and exacerbated by Washington’s “maximum pressure”, is the raw material with which more than one scenario is being negotiated — pain turned into a geopolitical bargaining chip.
These scenarios may be hypothetical. But the crisis’ tragedy, its exploitation for self-interest and the Cuban people’s inability to influence its outcome are not.
