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The economist Pedro Monreal published this Friday a thread of six tweets on his Twitter account to dismantle the "Economic and Social Program 2026" announced just hours earlier by Miguel Díaz-Canel, deeming it implausible that such proposals could bring about the transformation needed in the Cuban economic model.
Under the ironic title "And Then an Ox Flew," Monreal directly responded to the announcements that Díaz-Canel made on the program “Revista Buenos Días”, where the leader presented six reform axes and asked for the public's trust with the statement "the country is not at a standstill."
For Monreal, in light of the failure of the centralized planning model—primarily attributed to its own internal shortcomings—there are only two respectable options: "to accept the political cost of failure, or to critically reassess and drastically transform the model."
Any other option, he warned, is a deception: “As in other instances, the official narrative has been inflated to try to sell a supposed 'refinement' seasoned with 'opening' as a third alternative, which may still dazzle some, but is a stale ruse.”
The economist directly criticized the intellectual capacity of the government's economic team: "If the government thinks of nothing other than 'removing obstacles' and the 'centralization-decentralization contradiction,' or the municipality and the state enterprise as key components of the 'national machinery,' it speaks volumes about the intellectual fatigue of the government's economic team."
Monreal also linked the proposal to create a ministry of information and social communication with the regime's need to protect its narrative: "Listening to the recycling of old economic dogmas combined with new improvised notions helps to understand the proposal for a ministry of information and social communication, among other things, to maintain an economic discourse detached from reality."
In the final tweet of the thread, the economist summarized his argument with a phrase that captures the central critique: "The numbers don't add up, and the government wants to make it seem like it's not a matter of math, but of will," describing the model as an "economic sinkhole" that required more subsidized resources than it generated in real economic value.
The reforms announced by Díaz-Canel still need to be approved by the Political Bureau and the National Assembly, scheduled for July. Another Cuban economist described those same measures as "late pragmatism" on the same day.
The analysis by Monreal comes at the worst economic moment for Cuba in decades: the country has experienced a contraction of 23% in GDP since 2019, suffers from power outages lasting between 20 and 25 hours daily, and faces widespread shortages of water, fuel, and rampant inflation. In May, Monreal himself had warned that Cuba "missed the train" of reforms in the Chinese-Vietnamese style and that GDP could decline by as much as 15% by 2026.
Díaz-Canel, for his part, justified the opacity of his announcements with a warning: "We cannot say everything so clearly because the enemy is lurking in everything we do."
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