The economist Elías Amor warned this Thursday that Cuba's fiscal deficit exceeds 12% of GDP and that Miguel Díaz-Canel, during his address at the Extraordinary Plenary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party held on Wednesday, spoke about "stabilizing the economy" without ever explaining the real cause of the problem: uncontrolled inflation.
"The economy is sinking, GDP is falling, and at the same time, prices are skyrocketing, yet Díaz-Canel said nothing about it," Amor pointed out in an interview with Tania Costa to discuss the 23 key areas and 176 proposals for economic reform that the regime presented in that session.
The economist precisely explained the mechanism that sustains this imbalance. According to him, the deficit is the difference between what the Cuban government collects in taxes and what it spends on all its functions, and that gap can only be filled in one way.
"How is that deficit corrected? By printing money, because since the revenues do not cover the expenses, the gap is filled by turning on the money-printing machine," Amor noted.
The central problem is that this newly printed money does not reach the citizens; instead, it goes directly into the state's coffers.
"That money will not reach the citizens, which will further impoverish them as inflation rises and prices make them increasingly poorer," emphasized the economist.
Amor also pointed out that the regime has no incentive to reduce public spending because it controls the very mechanism that finances its excesses. “The State makes no effort to tighten its belt because, as it has monetary control of the Central Bank, no one can question its behavior.”
This vicious circle —more emissions, more inflation, more impoverishment— is precisely what Díaz-Canel failed to explain before the Plenary of the Central Committee of the PCC. The official inflation rate for 2025 closed around 14-15%, but Amor warns that it could escalate to 30-40% if the fiscal-monetary imbalance is not corrected.
In addition to this internal deficit, there is another that the regime keeps hidden: the external deficit, meaning the gap between what Cuba exports and what it imports.
"We do not have information regarding the external deficit. We do not know the state of foreign trade since 2024. We know that it has been going poorly, very poorly, because all the drivers of foreign trade have been on the decline," said Amor, who estimated that this second deficit "could also be very high."
The available data supports that concern: in 2024, Cuba exported $1.474 billion and imported $8.071 billion, resulting in a trade deficit of nearly $6.6 billion.
The Cuban budget for 2026, approved in December 2025, has already formalized a maximum deficit of 74.5 billion Cuban pesos, with projected revenues of 484.121 billion against expenditures of 550.590 billion. While the regime projects a GDP growth of 1%, the Economist Intelligence Unit estimates a decline of 7.2%, and CEPAL projects a contraction of 6.5% for this year.
In that context, the average salary in Cuba in 2025 was just 6,930 pesos per month —between five and 15 dollars at the informal exchange rate— while meeting basic needs requires over 50,000 pesos a month.
Amor was categorical in assessing the plan presented by Díaz-Canel: "This is a toast to the sun; it's not a conventional economic policy program. It has technical flaws, but it also has political shortcomings that will prevent the goals from being achieved."
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