The Castro power group is the "main responsible party for the national ruin," asserts a Cuban academic

The Cuban historian Mario Juan Valdés Navia, Associate Researcher at Duke University, published this Friday on the website CubaxCuba the essay "Eleven Steps of Economic Collapse (1959-2021)", in which he outlines a chronology of eleven key moments in the economic deterioration of Cuba from the triumph of the Revolution to 2021 and concludes that the Castro power group is the "primary responsible party for the national ruin."

The academic begins with a premise that contradicts the official narrative: in January 1959, Cuba was not a poor country. Its per capita income was around 2,363 dollars of that time, equivalent to 27,200 current dollars, placing it on par with Mexico, Chile, and Spain, and above South Korea and Singapore, economies that now significantly surpass it. The author warns that "the indicators do not allow us to wipe the slate clean and present Cuba in 1958 as a country in ruins, in need of miraculous solutions to progress."

The collapse was a direct consequence, Valdés Navia argues, of "the incessant absurdities of an improvised and erratic economic policy; the enormous defense expenditures in response to threats of intervention and the civil war (1959-1964); the projects aimed at exporting the revolution to countries in Latin America and Africa; and the growing confrontation with the U.S., Cuba's main trading partner since colonial times."

This essay is the second installment of a series. The first, published on June 5, documented the deliberate dismantling of the republican order during the first two years of the revolution and concluded that this process gradually turned Cuba into a "poor, begging country in the world."

Among the eleven steps of the collapse, the author emphasizes the forced nationalization of the agricultural economy through the agrarian reform laws of 1959 and 1963; the establishment between 1965 and 1975 of the "Economic Registry," a militaristic model that denied the regulatory role of the market; and the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968, which nationalized thousands of medium and small private businesses.

In 1985-1986, Fidel Castro stigmatized the socialist enterprise model as "mercantilist and pro-bourgeois" and launched the Rectification of Errors with the slogan "Now we are really going to build socialism!", which "accentuated the economic debacle even before the disappearance of the socialist camp" in 1990. The author adds that the dependence on Soviet subsidies "created an external dependency never seen before, neither in the colony nor in the republic."

One of the most detailed aspects is the expansion of the GAESA holding, created in 1994 under the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Valdés Navia describes this process as a "privatization of the national economy by the Castro family and their acolytes," which reserved for the Cuban population "three sad roles": obedient and poorly paid employees, captive consumers purchasing in forex at monopolistic prices, and emigrants forced to pay inflated ticket prices and send remittances, "a kind of ransom for the kidnapped." The U.S. Department of State stated in May that GAESA controls 40% or more of the Cuban economy, with assets of at least $17.894 billion. Recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio once again criticized the holding before the U.S. Senate. 

The essay concludes with the "Ordering Task" of 2021, which the author characterizes not as a reform but as "the terminal mechanism of parasitic enrichment of GAESA, overexploiting the Cuban nation both on the Island and within its diaspora." Implemented under pandemic conditions, it triggered a 77% inflation rate that year and was followed by the protests of July 11 and a violent crackdown.

The Cuban reality in 2026 confirms this diagnosis: extreme poverty affects 89% of the population, the average salary of less than 7,000 pesos per month is insufficient against a cost of living between 30,000 and 50,000 pesos, and The Economist Intelligence Unit projects a GDP decline of 7.2% in 2026. Valdés Navia, separated from Cuban universities in 2011 for writing critically about government policies, announces that he will dedicate an upcoming article to analyze the last five years based on the Tarea Ordenamiento.