Cuba's deputy prime minister spent this week telling anyone who'd listen that his government's biggest market opening in a generation wasn't handed down by Washington. Six months of tightening U.S. sanctions, he insists, haven't written a single line of the plan. What he leaves unsaid is that he's making that argument as a great-nephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro — a bloodline that complicates the claim that this is purely a technocratic, non-political exercise.
In a same-day interview with CNN's Juan Carlos López, Deputy Prime Minister Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga traced the overhaul back to the government's own economic and social program, arguing the measures rest on Cuban law and the constitution and answer to nothing but leadership's own push for "bienestar" — well-being. He also defended trimming the island's system of blanket subsidies, arguing that spreading aid equally across the whole population is mathematically unsustainable and that support should instead follow the person, in pursuit of what he called greater social justice.
