The proposals of June 2026 represent the most ambitious attempt at economic reform since the 1990s. One hundred and seventy-six transformations and twenty-three thematic axes that are, above all, the result of the extreme exhaustion of the previous, nominally socialist, productive and redistributive model.
The chronic scarcity of basic goods in State stores, inflation, and the fraying of the social contract make up the material force driving these transformations.
The heart of the proposals — transforming the State enterprise into a commercial company with majority State participation — raises justified alarms and puts pressure on the reach of social ownership over the fundamental means of production.
Socialism is not measured by the percentage of State ownership, but by the content of the relations of production.
Point 17 of the measures is revealing: it establishes neither self-management, nor workers’ co-management, nor democratic control by labour over capital and the bureaucracy, limiting itself to a change of legal form that opens the door to private capital without a popular counterweight in general, or one from the working class in particular.
In this case, the danger is not the presence of the minority capitalist partner per se, but the absence of mechanisms of participation that would allow workers to contest the logic of financial profitability, and the concentration of profit, when these come into conflict with the socially distributive function of economic processes.
The viability of so-called socialist ownership by the whole people is hard to reconcile with point 33, which aims to permit the purchase of shares and property of State enterprises by legal and natural persons, both national and foreign — something which, while it does not determine the character of management, does condition it significantly.
The measures permit the accumulation of private enterprises, large-scale hiring, and the acquisition of property rights over assets. These reinforce the material basis for an emerging new class to gain greater influence. It is worth noting that this class is not per se a monolithic bloc bound to take political power.
The nascent bourgeoisie is deeply heterogeneous: vulnerable small proprietors coexist with groups dependent on State contracts and fractions tied to foreign capital. Moreover, it suffers the asphyxiation of the blockade, which subordinates it to global capital and makes it more fragile than autonomous.
The real conflict that comes with this announcement of reforms moves within a tense triangle in which the State bureaucracy, the new private actors, and popular needs contend without a clear hegemonic project.
History shows that economic power tends to translate into political power, but in Cuba that translation could encounter constraints, which suggests we should not expect a simple linear “slide” of actors and modes of political management.
Axis 3 of the document proposes a model of financial planning with market signals. Another matter of long-standing controversy.
The market is a political space which, with adequate institutions and democratic control, could serve social ends — on condition that this is a strategic commitment and that the possibility is made operational. For that, the regulatory function of the State must not be renounced.
Point 38, which converts the State order [encargo estatal: the production assignment the State places on enterprises — Trans.] into a contract between suppliers and buyers, marks a paradox: the State ceases to be the guiding authority and becomes just another buyer — but if that State maintains a monopoly in certain sectors, this “subordination” may be less absolute than it appears.
The real complexity lies in the fact that neither the market nor planning are pure entities; their articulation will be a technical-political battlefield. Which sectors will benefit from the outcome of that dispute?
Axis 16 expands partial dollarisation; Axis 11 opens the banking system to private capital. Read together, they could mean the erosion of monetary sovereignty. In this scenario, it must be acknowledged that dollarisation is an adaptation to a fait accompli: the economy was already operating in foreign currency on the informal market, and the peso was devaluing without control.
The loss of monetary policy capacity is serious, but the alternative — maintaining the fiction of a strong currency without productive backing — had already demonstrated its failure.
The ceding of banking control may be risky, but the true core of sovereignty lies not in the exchange rate but in the capacity to generate tangible production. Without that, any monetary policy is a house of cards.
Axis 9 eliminates universal subsidies and replaces them with direct subsidies to individuals. This is perhaps the most delicate point; it reveals the risk of deepening exclusion.
At the same time, one must also consider the fact that the rationed basket [the libreta, Cuba’s system of rationed staples at subsidised prices — Trans.] no longer guaranteed effective universal protection; it was, in practice, an unequal and insufficient subsidy.
What is certain is that the shift to targeting exposes the most vulnerable. The success or failure of this change of concept will depend on the promised “Protection Fund” (point 71), whose current opacity is, without doubt, in my view, the reform’s greatest irresponsibility.
I believe that taking poverty as a variable would enable a significant shift in the understanding of the problem and its potential solutions. From this premise, two questions arise: will the structural changes underway also mean, at the same time, the sedimentation of pockets of poverty? And what proposals exist to mitigate that possibility?
A tense issue is that of usufruct for 99 years, or for an indeterminate period (which reverses what has been stipulated until now — only 10 years, which is no incentive to make the land productive), converting the land into de facto property, even as it sits at odds with point 58.a, which envisages maintaining the principle of ownership of the land by the whole people.
While the critique of territorial concentration and the opening to foreign capital is pertinent (including the tendering of protected areas), especially in a context of external siege, the agrarian reform of 1959 could no longer be sustained on the same model of the inefficient State farm; small peasant production, abandoned to its fate, was being devoured by the lack of inputs.
The new legal form is not necessarily a latifundist restoration, but it does demand anti-monopoly regulation and popular control that do not appear in the decrees. That absence is its greatest contradiction.
The peasant may become a commercial economic actor (entrepreneur or day labourer), but might also find in the transformed cooperative — provided it is genuinely a cooperative — a vehicle for productive improvement.
Participatory democracy is the missing link of this reform. Bureaucratic centralism and paternalism are not a novelty of these measures, but a structural continuum that dates from the Soviet period.
The reform does not introduce the limitation on popular participation; it inherits it and deepens it by privatizing decisions without counterweights. As I noted above, neither self-management, nor binding workers’ assemblies, nor participatory planning appear in the proposal.
Only in point 36 is there a plan to guarantee the protection of labour and social rights without permitting “indiscriminate exploitation.” Is this a de facto acceptance of relations of labour exploitation? Is this inevitable?
Herein lies the true drama of the reform process underway: the economic board is being rearranged without empowering workers (in all their heterogeneity as a class), who remain mere spectators of a game in which the bureaucracy and capital bid for their share.
Without democracy, any reform — statist or market-based — is a recipe for inequality. The potentialities of socialism die of the incapacity to build democratic institutions to regulate the hybridisation underway.
Where is Cuba heading? Far from a full capitalist restoration or a controlled updating of bureaucratic management, the scenario these measures sketch is that of a field of forces without a defined hegemonic project.
The pillars of historical socialism — social ownership, planning, universal protection, equal pay for equal work — are eroding, but they are not being replaced by a functional capitalism; rather, by a dysfunctional hybrid in which bureaucratic rentierism, the new private actors (fragmented and weak), the informal economy, unmet popular demands, and brutal external pressure all coexist.
The question is not whether socialism will survive, but in what form and at the cost of what struggles. Because reality, for now, is advancing toward a systemic quagmire in which everyone — government and new actors alike — is negotiating with the same crisis.
The alternative is not a return to immobilism, but the inclusion of elements of a democratizing socialism that does not confuse State ownership with socialisation. At the very least, a model that includes, within its mix, arrangements that empower workers to take decisions and to act as a counterweight to both the bureaucracy and capital.
But that path has not even been sketched; it will be contested in daily practice, in the cracks of a dual, dollarized economy, where certainties have dissolved.
In this scenario it is essential to return to an old question that has accompanied socialist experiences since the beginning of the twentieth century. Does the alternative lie only between the private management of capital and bureaucratic management?
Why have democratically managed enterprises not been included in the model — for example, with votes on investment and profits — instead of only joint-stock companies? Why not promote, on equal terms with private capital, a network of cooperative banks and municipal funds to reinvest in each territory? What place might energy cooperatives have in solving community problems? Why not create investment funds to channel remittances toward productive projects under democratic control?
The aim of this adjustment is to redistribute economic power toward the grassroots, to strengthen production without renouncing social control or eliminating private property, offering a path distinct from the private accumulation of capital.
From my point of view, the mirage of the reform underway — one amplified since the 1990s — is the belief that the alternative to the Cuban crisis lies between bureaucratic socialism and the private accumulation of capital. Within the current scenario, an alternative would be to include, on equal terms (political and legal), democratic, cooperative, and community forms for the management of productive processes.
Ariel Dacal Díaz is a writer and popular educator, with a doctorate in historical sciences from the University of Havana.
The Spanish original of this article originally appeared in La Joven Cuba. This English translation first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.
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