The Cuban regime announced this Thursday that it will allow and promote private companies to make financial investments, in an unprecedented measure presented before the National Assembly of People's Power during a live-streamed extraordinary session on Canal Caribe.
The provision, identified as measure 12 of the official package, states: "Allow and encourage companies (including private companies) to make financial investments."
Measure 13 complements this shift by ordering the "design of financial instruments that enable the capitalization of companies, without the participation of the State budget," implicitly acknowledging the exhaustion of the centralized public funding model.
A third provision, measure 14, mandates the implementation of a National Program for Valuation and Title of State Business Assets, which would conduct a national inventory of tangible and intangible assets with market valuation, issue executable property certificates as collateral guarantees for bank credit, and allow state enterprises to monetize underutilized assets through long-term leasing to various economic actors and foreign investment.
Historically, private companies in Cuba —micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, non-agricultural cooperatives, and self-employed workers— could only access loans in Cuban pesos for working capital, with strict limitations on financing in foreign currency.
They were not authorized to make financial investments as such, nor were there any capitalization instruments unrelated to state budget backing.
The complete package includes more than 20 economic and social measures and was presented by Miguel Díaz-Canel amid the most severe crisis Cuba has faced since the Special Period of the 1990s. The CEPAL recorded a decline in the Cuban GDP of 6.5% in 2026 and an accumulated contraction of 10.3% in the two-year period of 2025-2026.
Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged during the session that creative resistance is no longer enough to tackle the situation. "There are obstacles that do not come from outside or from the blockade," he admitted, in an unusual acknowledgment of the internal structural problems of the model. He also launched a rallying cry that summarizes the urgent tone of the day: "Enough of explaining the crisis; it's time to change."
The approval process was expedited: Díaz-Canel presented the emergency economic agenda on June 12, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba endorsed the package at an extraordinary plenary session on June 17, and the National Assembly addressed it this Thursday in an extraordinary session.
The package also includes the removal of price caps, the end of mandatory intermediaries in foreign trade, greater salary and currency autonomy for state-owned enterprises, opening up to foreign direct investment in the private sector —including small and medium-sized enterprises— and a reduction of ministries from 27 to between 20 and 21.
In March 2026, the government had already taken a first step by announcing that Cubans living abroad could invest in private companies under Law 118 on Foreign Investment, including the possibility of creating non-banking financial institutions and participating in investment funds with the authorization of the Central Bank of Cuba.
The economist Pedro Monreal had previously warned that the newly created National Institute of State Business Assets (INAEES) —an entity designed to manage over 2,000 state-owned enterprises— could become the "grave digger" of the state business system, a sign that the reforms generate both expectations and skepticism among the very analysts critical of the model.
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