HAVANA — Standing before delegates from communist and workers' parties gathered from around the globe, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel closed out this month's Havana summit with a message clearly meant for two audiences at once: his ideological guests, and the Cuban public watching at home. The island's economic overhaul, he insisted, is not a step toward capitalism.
A Familiar Denial, Delivered Again
Díaz-Canel made his case on August 8 at the close of the 24th International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, hosted at Havana's Convention Palace just five days before what would have marked Fidel Castro's 100th birthday. He framed the country's economic changes as an effort to strengthen the economy rather than replace it with a market system, ruling out any broad sell-off of state assets and pledging that the most important industries would remain under government control.
Díaz-Canel's insistence that reform doesn't equal capitalism isn't a new talking point. He has repeated a version of that line at nearly every public appearance in 2026, pairing it with warnings that the capitalist world itself is spiraling toward crisis.
What The 176 Measures Actually Change
The rhetoric strains against the substance. Back in June, Cuba's National Assembly voted unanimously to adopt 176 economic measures — described by wire reporting as the most far-reaching change to the island's state-run system since it embraced communism more than six decades ago. Foreign investors will no longer be forced to enter joint ventures with the state to do business on the island. Private companies can now be built without any cap on staff size. Cuban citizens, exiles, and outside investors will be permitted to buy equity directly in businesses that convert from state ownership to shareholding structures. And for the first time in decades, privately run banks will be allowed to operate.
One entity conspicuously missing from that list is Cuba's dominant military-run business empire, widely known by the acronym GAESA, which controls a commanding share of the island's tourism and retail sectors. Rather than being folded into the new share-buying rules, independent economists have specifically flagged that the conglomerate sits outside the 176-measure package entirely — a gap critics say leaves the country's most valuable and least transparent assets untouched by the very transparency the reforms are supposed to bring.
Sequence Check: Who Said What, and When
Díaz-Canel has acknowledged the contradiction in his own words. Addressing the Cuban Workers' Central's national congress, he told delegates the plan requires more "private property, private production, capitalism, and market elements," while maintaining that the Communist Party would keep political and strategic control over how it all unfolds.
A Crisis Forcing the Government's Hand
The urgency behind all this traces back to numbers Havana would rather not publicize. The U.N.'s regional economic body, ECLAC, projects Cuba's economy will contract by 6.5% in 2026, already the worst outlook anywhere in Latin America. The Economist Intelligence Unit has gone further, forecasting a steeper 7.2% contraction for the same year. Independent economist Pedro Monreal has warned the real figure could be far worse — potentially a 15% decline, on par with the worst year of the 1990s "Special Period" that followed the Soviet collapse.
Tourism, once a dependable source of hard currency, has cratered — falling from 4.7 million visitors in 2018 to under 2 million last year. Blackouts in parts of the country now often run longer than 20 hours at a stretch, a shortfall Díaz-Canel has tied to roughly 1,400 megawatts of generating capacity that remains offline because the country can't secure enough diesel and fuel oil to run it, according to CubaHeadlines' account of his closing speech.
Skeptics See a Different Kind of Capitalism Taking Shape
Not everyone believes the coming changes will benefit Cubans broadly. The watchdog group Food Monitor Program has cautioned that turning state enterprises into joint-stock companies risks funneling ownership toward people with political connections. Without independent audits and public disclosure, the group warned the process could end up "benefiting an authoritarian and patrimonialist form of capitalism."
The Lines Díaz-Canel Says He Won't Cross
Even while opening the door to shareholders and outside capital, Díaz-Canel maintains there are boundaries he considers untouchable: no privatizing health care, education, science, culture, or other services he deems strategic to the nation, and no loosening the Communist Party's hold on political power. He has also been unusually candid about the human toll of the crisis, acknowledging that Cuba's infant mortality rate has roughly doubled, climbing from a long-held rate of four or five deaths per 1,000 live births to about 9.8 today.
For now, the contradiction seems to be the point. A government founded on rejecting capitalism keeps adopting more of its mechanics with each passing year — while insisting, publicly and often, that it's doing nothing of the kind.
.png?w=600)
