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

Miguel Díaz-Canel announced on 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 that the opinions of the population be taken into account.

«Anyone who has a better idea and a better proposal should speak up, and it will always be evaluated», 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 state socialist enterprise. Do not reform it, do not rescue it, do not inject it with more subsidies. 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-run 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 proven to be unviable as a driver of development in any country around the world, 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, shops that have nothing to sell, and workers who earn miserable wages just to meet the requirements.

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

The socialist state enterprise is not designed to compete. It cannot be. For starters, 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 guided by political rather than economic criteria, led by party officials rather than businesspeople or entrepreneurs. 

In Cuba, this 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 an entire generation of Cubans who have chosen exile rather than continue waiting for the system to work.

Cuba does not need to reform its state-owned enterprise. It needs to liquidate it. Privatize anything of real value, sell what there are buyers for, 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.

The regime knows this. And precisely for that reason, 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 deliberate political decision to maintain control over a subjugated population.

Díaz-Canel asks for proposals. Here is mine. Although we already know the answer.