There is nothing to salvage: Cuba does not need to reform its state enterprise. It needs to liquidate it.

Miguel Díaz-Canel announced this Friday a package of economic reforms, in what the regime refers to as the "Economic and Social Program for 2026", for which he also requested consideration of the population's opinions.

"Anyone with a better idea or a better proposal should voice it, and it will always be considered", he stated, although he clarified that the measures have already been agreed upon and are ready to be approved "in a very swift manner."

Here is my proposal: eliminate the socialist state enterprise. Do not reform it, do not save it, do not inject more subsidies into it. Eliminate it. Because 67 years of evidence show that there is no possible solution within the model that created it.

Cuba does not need to reform its state-owned enterprise. It needs to liquidate it.

Cuba has been enduring one of the most failed economic experiments in modern history for over six decades. A model that has not proven viable as a driver of development in any country worldwide, and in Cuba, after 67 years of subsidies, political control, and market isolation, has been reduced to its most pathetic expression: factories that do not produce, stores that have nothing to sell, and workers who receive miserable wages for merely fulfilling the requirements.

It is not a problem of management or circumstances. It is a structural and ideological failure. The Soviet Union collapsed partly because it upheld that model until it became unsustainable. Eastern Europe dismantled it en masse during the 1990s. China and Vietnam, which today exhibit some economic dynamism, achieved this precisely by stripping their state-owned enterprises of real content and making room for private initiative. The countries that persist with the model—Cuba and North Korea—are, not coincidentally, the poorest, the most repressed, and those with the highest population exodus in their respective regions.

The socialist state enterprise is not designed to compete. It cannot be. To begin with, it has no owner, and as we all know, what belongs to "everyone" belongs to no one. It lacks incentives for efficiency, operating with soft budgets that the State covers regardless of the results.

Its management is based on political criteria, not economic ones; it is directed by party officials, not by businesspeople or entrepreneurs. 

In Cuba, that logic has been taken to the extreme: these companies exist to create fictitious jobs, keep the population dependent on the State, and justify subsidies that perpetuate the regime's control over the daily lives of Cubans.

The result is evident. Industries destroyed, infrastructure collapsed, productivity so low that it is almost impossible to measure, and a whole generation of Cubans who have chosen exile rather than continue waiting for the system to work.

Cuba does not need to reform its state enterprise. It needs to liquidate it. Privatize what has real value, sell what finds a buyer, and close without hesitation what is not useful. Opening the economy to competition, investment, and individual initiative is the only path that has proven to work anywhere in the world.

The regime knows this. And that is precisely why it will not do it. A free economy generates independent citizens, and independent citizens do not need a dictatorship. The socialist state enterprise in Cuba is not a mistake: it is a conscious political decision to maintain control over a subdued population.

Díaz-Canel is asking for proposals. Here’s mine. Although we already know the answer.