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The latest experiment is called Decree-Law 114/2025, published this week in the Official Gazette. With it, the dictatorship allows private companies to "partner" with state entities. The announcement is presented as a historic opening. In practice, it is a desperate attempt to inject fresh blood into corpses that have already been stinking for thirty years.
The dead remain dead
The Cuban state company is not in crisis. The Cuban state company is the crisis. It is the model that destroyed the agriculture of a country that was once the breadbasket of the Caribbean. The model that ruined the most efficient sugar industry in the hemisphere. The model that reduced to rubble hotels, factories, and hospitals that once operated. There is no cosmetic reform that can change this, because the problem is not one of management: it is one of nature.
A company that cannot go bankrupt, that does not compete, and that answers to no one except a Party bureaucrat is not a company. It is a bottomless pit where the country's resources and the energy of its people are consumed. Calling it a "state business entity" does not make it anything else.
The "association" that is not an association
The decree states that the partners "freely agree" on the percentage of participation. Magnificent. Except that any subsequent modification requires approval from the Ministry of Economy and Planning. Except that the request needs the endorsement of the head of the corresponding state agency. Except that the Ministry can deny the partnership if it deems it contrary to "public order or national security" — a clause so broad that it can encompass anything that the regime finds inconvenient.
In other words: you can partner with the Cuban state as long as the Cuban state decides, under the terms that the Cuban state approves, to do what the Cuban state authorizes. An extraordinary freedom.
The Logic of the Vampire
The Cuban regime does not reform; it extracts. It has always been this way. When the private sector was productive, they collectivized it to seize the harvest. When self-employed workers emerged, they regulated them to the point of suffocation and imposed taxes that no state-owned company pays. With remittances, they created foreign currency stores and all the schemes like CUC, MLC, etc., solely to siphon those dollars into the state's coffers.
Decree-Law 114 is the same pattern in a new guise. The Cuban private sector has proven, against all odds, that it knows how to produce, how to survive, and how to innovate with very little and without electricity. Instead of freeing it from its chains, the regime has chosen to tether it to the leg of the state’s corpse to see if that way the dead can be resurrected.
The logic is not that of the reformer who opens markets. It is that of the vampire who needs fresh blood because his own has run out. And like every vampire, he will not willingly let go of his victim. He will keep sucking until there is nothing left—or until someone drives a stake through him.
What Cuba needs and the regime refuses to provide
No more decrees are needed. What Cuba needs is for the state to stop occupying space that does not belong to it. Inefficient state-owned enterprises should be liquidated, privatized, or transformed into genuine cooperatives with true autonomy. A Cuban should be able to start their own business without seeking permission from seven different agencies. Private property should be a real right, not a concession that the regime grants and withdraws at its convenience.
That is not going to happen with Decree-Law 114. Nor with 115, nor with 200. Because it would imply that the Communist Party renounces the economic control that, at this point, is the only real power it has left.
Meanwhile, the regime will continue to organize funerals with dancing, calling them reforms.
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Opinion article: Las declaraciones y opiniones expresadas en este artículo son de exclusiva responsabilidad de su autor y no representan necesariamente el punto de vista de CiberCuba.