As unprecedented US sanctions push Cuba deeper into crisis, Havana is embracing sweeping market reforms while insisting it is not abandoning socialism.
An old car drives past debris from a demolished house occupying part of the seaside promenade in the Centro Habana neighborhood, in Havana on June 9, 2026. (Pablo Porciuncula / AFP via Getty Images)
The Cuban government is implementing a dramatic opening to foreign and domestic capital, private business, the market and the dollar, and has promised to take a machete to its traditionally obstinate bureaucracy, as it grapples with a US fuel blockade and devastating secondary sanctions that threaten to bring economic activity to a standstill.
As the government moves definitively past decades-old taboos on the exploitation of man by man, Cuban officials have taken pains to explain it is simply trying to free the forces of production from any internal obstacles as it defends the socialist country’s universal healthcare, education, culture, and sports.
“The transformations do not imply giving up the social responsibility of the State but recognize market mechanisms as instruments for the efficient allocation of resources,” Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said on June 19, upon presenting the plan for final approval to an emergency session of the National Assembly of People’s Power.
No Cuban official has suggested that the 176 measures will counter the US assault on the country in the short term. Rather, they aim to rectify the government’s mistakes by eliminating festering regulatory obstacles amid a grave economic and energy crisis. The measures also offer an opportunity to US businesses if sanctions are loosened or lifted. They include negotiating US claims over property lost at the time of the 1959 Revolution and property swaps for such debt.
The new measures will be rolled out urgently in the coming weeks and months, Marrero said. Instead of different rules for state and private economic actors, all will operate under the same loosened regulations, ending years of debate over the issue. State companies will have to sink or swim in a market environment in competition with private companies. Joint ventures will be able to hire and fire directly, without going through government hiring halls, a long-standing investor demand.
There are an estimated 2,650 state companies that account for the lion’s share of goods and services produced in the country. There were 12,650 privately incorporated, nonagricultural, micro, small and medium-sized businesses as of June, with more than 7,000 applications pending. A cap on private businesses’ having more than 100 employees will be lifted and individuals authorized to own more than one company. While most sectors of the economy are open to nonagricultural private business, for the first time they can enter the financial and agricultural sectors. The government said all pending applications would be processed by July.
“We submitted our application some two months ago (so it was relatively far down the list of pending applications), and it was approved today…. It seems the promise to approve them all by month’s end is being kept. A good signal,” a local businessman said on June 29, requesting anonymity.
According to the reform plan, all economic actors will be able to invest in one another’s businesses, including purchasing shares, and form partnerships. Prohibitions on Cubans living at home and abroad partaking in economic activities of all kinds will be lifted. All economic actors will be encouraged through tax and other incentives to use solar power. The state will control the fray through taxes and other financial tools, versus assigning resources. Most business decisions will be left to the companies in coordination with provincial and municipal authorities. State-run companies will still predominate in strategic sectors of the economy, but in most cases will no longer be subsidized and administered by a government that directly takes their income, in addition to taxes. Hiring, firing, wages, and some other labor policies will no longer be micromanaged by central authorities.
Price controls are already being eliminated along with the constant inspections needed to enforce them. Most economic actors will be authorized to engage directly in foreign and domestic trade in dollars or pesos without going through the government. For the first time all economic actors can now open business accounts abroad. When investment and private business proposals are not reviewed on time, they will be automatically authorized. People, not goods and services, will be subsidized except in health, education, sports, and culture. All economic actors will be encouraged to become involved in local economic and social development.
We Are Not Appeasing the United States
The fuel blockade and recent sanctions have devastated an economy already down 16 percent when the year began, compared with 2019 when the first Trump administration first started piling on new sanctions on top of the decades-old embargo. Most experts believe the decline will double this year and hyperinflation persist.
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“The high-pressure situation we are in right now pushes us to speed things up a bit, to make decisions faster, to have to take action; but not because we are giving in to pressure from the United States,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in a recent interview with Roberto Cavada, a Dominican Republic–based Cuban journalist. “We are looking for ways to overcome those pressures without compromising the sovereignty, independence, and self-determination of our country,” he said.
The Trump administration, which has openly targeted Cuba for regime change and repeatedly said it is next after Venezuela and Iran, has dismissed the reforms. Mexico, Vietnam, Russia, China, and other countries have applauded them.
The “economic and social transformations” announced last month build on a similar effort in 2011 called the “economic and social guidelines” that were debated throughout the country. The Communist Party and government have been trying to implement those measures ever since with mixed results. Many local economists and foreign experts blame ideological differences and bureaucratic and vested interests for the sluggish pace of market reforms. They say with the country laid to waste by the Trump administration those forces have lost economic and ideological leverage, allowing reformers to move forward.
Economist Julio Carranza has insisted for decades that Cuba needs a more market-driven socialism. Carranza, along with four other prominent economists, two of whom are also well-known critics of current policy, recently met with President Díaz-Canel as a new advisory group. In an interview with the OnCuba news platform, Carranza said the recent measures represented a learning curve Cuban society has undergone since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said the new realities of the international situation and harsh conditions facing the population were decisively pushing reform forward.
“Inertia, misunderstandings, dogmas, and vested interests were a constant opposing force. What is new now is to have openly recognized this and the political will to move beyond that resistance,” Carranza said. “With consensus, essential popular participation, accountability and good leadership, it can be done.”
Díaz-Canel, upon closing a trade union congress on June 27, called for self-criticism, saying, “At this point, there is a self-criticism we all need to do, starting with the country’s top leaders…for the delay in implementing measures while waiting for greater awareness of the need for changes and a more favorable context.”
The guidelines were first advanced and adopted under the leadership of Raúl Castro, who in 2008 replaced his older brother Fidel Castro as president and in 2011 as first secretary of the Communist Party. Díaz-Canel filled both positions when Castro stepped down because of the 10-year term limits on each. Ironically, the two leaders, who are believed to have fought endless inside battles to implement the reforms, are the main targets of the Trump administration’s current demands for an end to Communist control and socialism in Cuba. Castro was recently indicted on trumped-up charges dating back 30 years and various US officials have called on Díaz-Canel to resign.
Cuban officials have repeatedly expressed a willingness to negotiate with Washington about anything and everything except its domestic and foreign policies, but say an informal dialogue has stalled. “I can negotiate with anyone designated by the US,” Raúl Castro’s grandson “Raúlito” Rodriguez Castro told USA Today during a recent interview in Havana. “If given the opportunity, [of course with] Trump.”
A Bit of Hope Amid Despair
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The measures come amid an exodus of foreign investors and trading partners fleeing threats of new US sanctions on companies doing business even indirectly with the military-run holding company GAESA, as well as the mining sectors. GAESA controls and interacts with large swaths of the economy. The threat of US sanctions has shut down a nickel venture, most hotel ventures, and European maritime shipping companies accounting for around 60 percent of current traffic, among other long-standing international partners.
Over the last six months, only a single oil tanker has arrived—from Russia—though there were around 60 during the first six months of 2025, creating what various United Nations agencies charge is a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis and increasing desperation among the population. Cuba imports 60 percent of the fuel it consumes.
Speaking to an emergency meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee that approved the reforms, Díaz-Canel said daily blackouts, that now last for 20 hours or more, mean “the child who couldn’t study for the test, the food that spoiled in the refrigerator, the elderly person who spends the night awake and hot. It’s the hospital working at its limit, the doctor’s office that can’t store medication, the worker who loses a day’s work, and the business that has to close.” Residents add that the energy crisis also means water that can’t be pumped and loss of connectivity and mobility. Parents worry that the government program to vaccinate kids against 14 childhood diseases will sputter to a halt for lack of raw materials, power, transport, and refrigeration. They say scarcity of food and medicine is worsening and prices are rising.
“It is horrible, horrible, horrible,” my friend Lydia simply responded when I asked how she was doing in the broiling summer heat. Lydia is a retired nurse who is taking care of her 97-year-old mother, who suffers from dementia.
“She needs milk and it is very expensive,” Lydia said. “Who knows, maybe these new policies will help.”
A WhatsApp chat the other evening with another friend is typical of the chitchat on Havana’s streets:
Sandra: More than 24 hours without lights.
Me: I’m sorry. Here it comes and goes but it’s not that bad.
Sandra: I have not had lights since before 6 pm yesterday and still nothing. I am desperate.
Me: And your backup system?
Sandra: I turned it off. It has a little charge left to pump water just in case it comes in.… I need to use it for the water.
Both women asked that their full names not be published.
Sandra, in a phone call and like many other Cubans, said she was skeptical any relief was imminent given US pressure and the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground.
“What can I do?” she said. “I doubt much will change for the better, but I can hope.”
Marc FrankMarc Frank is a freelance journalist, author, and lecturer who has lived in and covered Cuba since the 1980s. His latest book is Cuban Revelations, Behind the Scenes in Havana.