A New Cuban Economy?, by Samuel Farber – 31 July 2026

From Foreign Policy In Focus

Will the proposed changes persuade the Trump administration to alter its current policy towards Cuba?

On June 18, Manuel Marrero Cruz, the Cuban prime minister, unveiled a 176-point program to radically restructure the Cuban economy. Marrero appealed to his audience at the National Assembly of Popular Power with the argument that “socialist planning does not exclude but must incorporate and regulate the rules of the market.” As it is customary in Cuba’s one-party state, what political leaders do not openly declare can be more important than what is explicitly stated.

Thus, Marrero said nothing about the reforms being motivated by the repeated ultimatums of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the Cuban government to make radical changes towards the market and capitalism. Otherwise Cuba would face even more drastic escalations of the blockade implemented by Trump, which included blocking the Cuban government from importing oil, thereby extending the blackouts that the Cuban people have been suffering for months. Moreover, Trump effectively pressured several shipping companies such as Hapag-Lloyd and foreign hotel chains like the Spanish Meliá to abandon Cuba. In the context of Trump’s loud support for the rightward move of Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, the measures against Cuba must be seen as part of what the Cuban writer Rafael Rojas aptly called “the road towards a recolonization of Cuba.”

A central element of the 176 reforms presented by Premier Marrero is to bring Cuban state enterprises as close as possible to regular capitalist enterprises while avoiding the Cuban state’s total loss of economic control. Thus, while the government will maintain majority control of the state enterprises, these will be able to buy stock in other enterprises as well as to sell their own stock to any investor including foreigners and Cubans residing abroad. Businesses established with foreign capital no longer have to select and employ personnel with the government acting as a monopolistic employment agency and can freely import from abroad whatever they need to run their enterprises.

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Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and has written numerous books and articles about the country. He is an emeritus professor of political science at the City University of New York (CUNY).

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