Cuba cannot replicate the economic model of China or Vietnam, and the reasons go far beyond the U.S. embargo: they are cultural, structural, and, above all, political.
The analysis begins with the first interview of the Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel on U.S. television, aired last Sunday on the program "Meet the Press" on NBC News, where the representative of the regime argued that the fundamental difference between the island and the Asian country lies in the duration of the embargo.
China and Vietnam were also under U.S. sanctions, but those pressures lasted only about a decade, while Cuba has been under embargo for over 60 years, Díaz-Canel justified. However, for economists and political scientists, the real answer lies elsewhere.
"Cuba has not adopted the Chinese-Vietnamese model because we Cubans are not Chinese", is an acknowledgment that the system itself makes about its limitations.
The cultural argument is the first to emerge in analyses on the topic. The Chinese Communist Party is a modernized continuation of the millennia-old mandarin structure, based on obedience and hierarchical authority.
"The current Communist Party is what the mandarins used to be... Transformed into something else. It is part of their culture. We have never been like that," the analysis notes.
Cuban culture, on the other hand, operates under a different logic. "We are more relaxed. More liberal in every sense. As conservative as we can be in this or that, we are more liberal. No, it's not possible," concludes the analysis on the feasibility of transplanting that model to the Island.
But culture is not the only obstacle. There is also a crucial structural reason: scale. China has a significant amount of resources to create its own economic logic and project itself onto the world, while Cuba lacks the critical mass of population, resources, and productive capacity that allowed China and Vietnam to absorb the shocks of their reforms.
The regime knows this, which is why it chose another path: rent-seeking. "They have always understood that without a different economic dynamic, well-being was not possible. And they opted for a rent-seeking economy to avoid granting those levels of autonomy. To avoid being politically weakened," the analysis explains.
The formula was simple and devastating: "I provide political services to the Soviet Union and they give me money. I give advice to Chávez and they give me oil. That is rent-seeking."
That model allowed the regime to avoid real reforms for decades, but it has an expiration date. The USSR disappeared in 1991, and the Venezuelan flow has progressively dwindled since 2019. Cuba currently lacks a new pattern to finance its stagnation.
Within the system itself, however, not everyone has viewed things the same way. When Fidel Castro rejected an economic reform at the Congress in 1982, the Armed Forces began to build their own economic apparatus, now embodied in GAESA, the military conglomerate that controls tourism, retail, and banking, with assets estimated at over 18 billion dollars.
"For the Armed Forces, control also involves well-being. And for the party, if well-being must be sacrificed for control, then it must be sacrificed. There are two distinct sensitivities at play," the analysis points out.
This divergence raises a question that the analysis leaves open: could there be within the Cuban military leadership figures willing to support a transition? The analysis does not affirm this, but neither does it dismiss it, and it suggests that this difference in sensitivities has existed for decades.
The debate takes on greater significance in the current context. Díaz-Canel promised in March 2026 a Cuban economic model "better than China," combining centralized planning with market elements, but without deep structural reforms.
The jurist and political scientist Roberto Veiga, director of Cuba Próxima, noted that these statements are part of the efforts of negotiations that seem to be progressing between Havana and Washington, although the regime has not abandoned its red lines.
Meanwhile, Cuba maintains only 20-30% of its economy in the private sector, compared to the 60% that it represents in China according to World Bank data.
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