Cuba leader admits ‘urgent changes’ needed to overcome crisis

Cuba’s communist model needs “urgent changes” to overcome a major crisis which cannot be solely blamed on a crippling U.S. oil blockade, President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in his frankest admission yet of the need for radical reforms.

“The situation calls for urgent and necessary changes,” Mr. Diaz-Canel told the Communist Party’s politburo in remarks broadcast on Thursday (June 18).

Mr. Diaz-Canel was speaking at a meeting called to fast-track reforms aimed at boosting the private sector and attracting more capital from millions of Cubans who have fled the crisis abroad.

The proposals are part of a desperate, eleventh-hour bid to stave off economic collapse in the face of unprecedented U.S. pressure.

Mr. Diaz-Canel cited China and Vietnam as possible models for opening Cuba’s economy to the world in order to “create economic wealth and distribute it equally.”

Some of the reforms “will not have absolute consensus but cannot be postponed,” Mr. Diaz-Canel stressed.

“When people’s lives become this hard,” the Communist Party and government had a responsibility to “change what needs to be changed” rather than try to explain away the crisis, he argued.

The oil blockade imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump in January has brought Cuba’s already moribund economy to the brink of collapse, marked by power cuts sometimes lasting over 30 hours and shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.

While Havana’s position has been to blame its woes on a more-than-six-decade U.S. trade embargo and the blockade, Diaz-Canel admitted there were “obstacles that don’t come from outside, nor the blockade.”

He pointed to “slowness, bureaucracy and norms that impede those who want to produce” as well as “decisions that we have put off.”

The reforms were approved by the Communist Party on Wednesday.

They also received the blessing of nonagenarian ex-president Raul Castro, widely seen as the power behind the throne, who described them as “the most beneficial to the revolution at this time.”

They are expected to be approved by the National Assembly, which rubber-stamps legislation, in a vote later Thursday.

‘Worse each day’

It is unclear, however, whether the changes will satisfy Trump, who is pushing for a change in Cuba’s leaders as well as its economic model.

Many disillusioned Cubans shrugged off the announcements as either too little too late or an outright “lie.”

Some of the reforms announced were a rehash of earlier proposals, such as granting greater autonomy to state-owned enterprises, which account for roughly 80 percent of economic activity.

“It’s a lie, we’ve been doing this for 67 years (since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution) and it gets worse every day,” Iris Montero Borges, a 58-year-old cleaner at state telecoms company Etecsa who had been without power at home for 12 hours, told AFP.

The country’s small but growing business class welcomed the changes, however, while making clear they did not see them as a quick fix.

Private businesses, which can employ up to 100 people, were authorized in 2021 and have become an increasingly important part of the island’s economy.

The reforms “offer hope, a chance that may or may not materialize,” said Mario Gonzales, the 32-year-old manager of a restaurant in Havana’s historic old town which was thronged with tourists a decade ago and now fills only a handful of tables for dinner