At the Cuban regime's Round Table held this Friday, a participant openly raised the dilemma facing the island: to continue managing the crisis with the same old tools or to transform them to adapt to a reality that no longer allows for band-aid solutions.
The conclusion was that change, although costly, is less damaging than inaction.
The debate takes place in the context of the 176 economic transformation measures approved by the National Assembly in its extraordinary session of June 2026, a package that includes the opening up to private banking, currency exchange houses, the conversion of state-owned enterprises into commercial companies, and the removal of the limit of 100 workers for small and medium-sized enterprises.
One of the participants described the currency situation starkly: the foreign exchange market "primarily operates through unofficial mechanisms," and the exchange rate is rising rapidly in both the informal and official circuits.
According to data from the Observatory of Currencies and Finances of Cuba (OMFi) from elToque, the Cuban peso was trading at 685 CUP per dollar in June 2026, compared to around 500 CUP in February of the same year.
"Continuing to manage the crisis with traditional tools comes at a cost; transforming those tools also has a cost, but we believe that, at this moment, the transformation involves a lower cost," affirmed one of the participants in the program.
The central argument of the fragment is that Cuba has underutilized resources—land, people, knowledge, installed productive capacities—that cannot be leveraged due to a lack of liquidity or investment, and that "internal obstacles" hinder the connection of these resources with available capital.
In that context, one of the most revealing questions of the debate arose: "What good is it to have a central, a good industry that belongs to the country but is paralyzed and cannot produce? Is it better to have it shut down or for someone to come in, invest, and achieve production and results?"
The question encapsulates the ideological tension that runs through the entire package of reforms, acknowledged by the participants themselves as a "complex and adverse political, ideological, and even communicational context."
In response to the criticism that the measures indicate a departure from socialism, the official argument was that Díaz-Canel insists that there is no renunciation of socialism: "none of this is incompatible with our social model; rather, it is a way to defend socialism, supporting it with a material foundation that ensures social protections for our people."
However, the very debate in the Round Table acknowledged that "external pressure and internal distortions have favored the discussion on the viability of socialism and socialist construction in Cuba," and that the underlying question is "whether socialism can address the serious problems our society is facing."
ECLAC projects a decline of 6.5% in Cuba's GDP in 2026 and an accumulated contraction of 10.3% in the biennium of 2025-2026, with a total regression of around 26% since 2020. These figures illustrate the magnitude of the accumulated economic failure that now forces the regime to reform instruments it defended for decades.
The implementation of the 176 measures will require changes to more than 148 legal provisions, a process that the regime must complete in an environment of foreign currency shortages, uncontrolled inflation, and a population that has been enduring blackouts and shortages for years.
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