The Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero acknowledged before the National Assembly that the implementation of the package of 176 economic and social transformations, approved on June 19, will create "contradictions" that the regime will have to address along the way.
His statements were made during an extraordinary session broadcast live by Canal Caribe. The public acknowledgment of internal tensions is unusual in official Cuban discourse and reflects the extent of the pressure facing the government amid the most severe crisis since the Special Period of the 1990s.
Marrero identified four specific contradictions that will arise from the implementation of the package:
- the impact of partial dollarization on economic assessment
- the relationship between subsidy removal and prices
- the decentralization of responsibilities to municipalities without sufficient management capacity
- the liberation of agricultural prices without a proportional increase in production.
Despite acknowledging those tensions, the Prime Minister defended the series of measures based on the principle of "doing what's necessary to preserve the essentials," and asserted that "these actions do not represent a capitulation, but rather a sovereign adjustment of development instruments to the specific circumstances of the country."
The approved package includes significant changes: authorization of private banking and private exchange houses, transformation of state enterprises into stock companies, removal of the limit of 100 workers for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (mipymes), the possibility for an individual to own multiple businesses, and authorization for private actors to import and market fuels.
There is also an expansion of openness to foreign investment—including Cubans living abroad—, a gradual introduction of a value-added tax, and the subsidy system will shift from being generalized to being targeted at retirees and vulnerable individuals.
At the institutional level, the number of ministries will be reduced from 27 to between 20 and 21, and the implementation of the package will require modifying more than 148 legal provisions and approving 32 new regulations of a higher rank.
Marrero also acknowledged the government's own mistakes: "We have never denied our own errors and shortcomings," he stated before the deputies, though he attributed the economic deterioration primarily to the U.S. embargo.
To legitimize the shift, Marrero invoked the principles of former leader Raúl Castro: not to be dogmatic or immobilistic, to separate socialism from egalitarianism, and to accept that "socialist planning does not exclude, but rather must incorporate and regulate market rules."
The regime described the 176 measures as the most profound since the update of the economic model initiated by Raúl Castro in 2011, although the acknowledgment that the current legal framework requires massive reform to make them feasible indicates that the system built over decades of dictatorship was incompatible with the transformations that the government now presents as a solution.
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