The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) forecasted in February 2026 a contraction of the Cuban GDP by 7.2% for this year, a figure that the Cuban economist Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo described this Friday as "a very strong contraction" during a live interview.
De Miranda, a full professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali and a researcher with a PhD in International Economics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, also warned that the actual decline could exceed that forecast.
The economist calculated that if the EIU's projection holds, the cumulative contraction of the Cuban economy since 2019 would reach 23%. "It's a staggering amount over seven years," he stated.
The deterioration began before the pandemic—with a decline of 0.2% in 2019—and deepened with contractions of between 8% and 8.3% in 2020, with the island failing to recover as other countries in the region did.
The CEPAL has already certified that Cuba and Haiti would be the only two economies in Latin America to experience contraction in 2025. "We are in the worst-case scenario in the Latin American region," De Miranda pointed out.
Cuba's GDP per capita was only $1,082 in 2025, compared to a regional average of $10,212. Between 1990 and 2024, the Cuban economy grew by just 1.1% cumulatively, which amounts to virtually total stagnation.
De Miranda warned that the EIU forecast was prepared in February, before several developments that worsen the outlook became known.
A worse outlook
The cut in Venezuelan oil supply —Cuba depended on between 25,000 and 30,000 barrels a day— following the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 has deepened an energy crisis that was already causing blackouts of up to 20 to 25 hours a day.
Tourism plummeted from 4.7 million visitors in 2018 to 1.8 million in 2025. On March 4th, Jamaica announced that it would not renew the medical cooperation agreement with Cuba, which has been in effect since 1976, depriving Havana of a significant source of foreign currency.
This is compounded by the destruction of the sugar industry: the 2024-2025 harvest produced less sugar than in 1899.
"Economic sanctions are not responsible for the destruction of the sugar industry. The ones who are responsible are, first and foremost, Fidel Castro," stated De Miranda, referring to the dismantling of 120 sugar mills ordered in 2002.
The economist was emphatic in stating that the Cuban government refuses to undertake structural reforms for fear of losing political control.
"If the country has to continue becoming poorer as it has at the cost of not relinquishing power, then they prefer that it becomes poorer," he said.
He described the regime's recent measures—such as Decree 114 for partnerships between state and private enterprises—as inconsistent patches lacking systemic coherence, and he recalled that the government officially projected a growth rate of 1% for 2026, a figure that experts consider unrealistic.
The interview took place on the same day that Díaz-Canel publicly confirmed the existence of conversations with the United States, after having denied them multiple times.
De Miranda noted that the presence at that meeting of the Political Bureau of Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro —grandson of Raúl Castro, with no official position in the government— illustrates the level of "deinstitutionalization" in the country.
"There is no light at the end of the tunnel under the current political conditions. I say this clearly," concluded De Miranda, who on March 3 published in The New York Times the article 'The End of the Illusion for Cuba's Regime', where he argued that the Cuban political-economic model has reached a critical point of no return.
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