Cuba’s Communist Party has introduced the most sweeping changes to the country’s model of socialism since the revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959. But will it be enough to keep Donald Trump at bay?
Some must get rich first
Cuba’s National Assembly last week unanimously approved 176 measures that will transform every dimension of the island’s economy, from private property and labour law to market pricing, banking and foreign investment.
But in a speech before the vote, president Miguel Díaz-Canel told legislators the changes were about maintaining Cuba’s socialist model rather than renouncing it.
“What is being debated here is the dilemma of how to continue the process of socialist construction, which has suffered the longest blockade in history from the world’s greatest power,” he said.
Cuba has been subject to a trade embargo from the United States for more than 60 years but Trump tightened the screw on the island in January by imposing an oil blockade. This has caused extended power cuts and shortages of food, drinking water and medicine, leading to a warning this month from the United Nations human rights commissioner that children are dying because of Washington’s action.
The measures approved last week will for the first time allow private companies to employ more than 100 workers and entrepreneurs to own more than one business. Price controls will be replaced with targeted subsidies for the poorest, and Cuba’s flat-wage system will be abolished in a move Díaz-Canel said would incentivise people to work harder.
Companies and individuals “including Cubans living abroad” will be able to buy state-owned property, and private developers will be allowed to operate in the property market. Foreign investors will no longer have to form joint ventures with state-owned enterprises to operate in the country and private banks will be allowed to enter the financial sector.
Díaz-Canel said that many of these proposals had been the subject of internal discussion within the Communist Party for 15 years and that it had been a mistake to postpone them. He said Cuba must unleash productive forces to create economic wealth and distribute it “with social justice and equity – not egalitarianism” if it is to keep faith with Castro’s revolution.
“Without wealth, there is nothing to distribute; we would be speaking of social justice in the abstract. Social justice as conceived by the revolution – with its humanistic mission to help the most disadvantaged, generally through free welfare programmes and projects – does not cost the people anything, but it does cost the state. And to carry it out, to deepen it, to sustain it, and to maintain it, the state needs wealth – and we must produce that wealth ourselves. If there is no wealth, there is no social justice, and everything else is a fairy tale,” he said.
There was an unmistakable echo of Deng Xiaoping’s rhetoric when he made the case for reforming China’s economy in the 1980s, declaring that “some must get rich first, and help others to get rich in order to gradually achieve common prosperity”. Deng’s reforms transformed the Chinese economy and increased inequality while lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but it left the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of political power in place.
Cuba’s communist leadership may hope the measures approved last week will help them to hold on to power while changing the economic system in a way that is also in line with the demands of the US government. Vice-president JD Vance said last week that Washington wanted Cubans to be “happy and successful” and was working with the Cuban government “about how they could change their ways”.
But secretary of state Marco Rubio has identified the removal of Cuba’s communist government as a precondition for lifting the embargo. And Trump mused last week that invading Cuba would, like his attack on Venezuela in January, be an easier military operation than the US war against Iran.
“If you look at Iran, that’s a very long trip. You know, I flew to that area a few times and unrelated to this, but you’re flying for 18 hours, you’re flying for a long time. Venezuela is relatively close and Cuba is a hopscotch,” he told Axios.
“Venezuela has oil. Cuba doesn’t. Cuba has a nice property and they have nice shoreline.”
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