The Cuban journalist Ricardo Ronquillo openly acknowledged that Cuba faces "very pronounced areas of poverty" and a growing social gap, in the context of the debate on the package of 176 economic measures approved by the National Assembly.
Ronquillo was emphatic in stating that inequality is not a recent phenomenon nor a result of the latest decisions made by the regime: "This is something that has been happening unfortunately in the country for some time now, since the economic model transformations began."
As evidence, he cited the Gini coefficient, which, according to academic analyses, increased from 0.25 in 1989 to values between 0.4 and 0.5 today: "Social differentiation in Cuba has been growing; this is reflected in the famous Gini index, which indicates a considerable gap between those who have the most and those who have the least."
One of the most striking moments of the debate was the description of the disparity that exists on any street in Cuba today: “while someone is buying the most famous brand-name product in the world, there may be someone else purchasing the last item pulled from a dumpster, selling it at the entrance of a corner on any street in Cuba.”
Ronquillo also warned that this inequality does not always stem from honest work, which raises another concern: "to what extent do these measures also favor corrupt networks on a national scale?"
The participant acknowledged that the package of measures—structured around 23 axes and over 170 actions—accepts a degree of inequality as the cost of growth, but drew a line: “These measures aim to prevent us from continuing to equalize Cuban society in poverty, and while some degree of inequality is accepted, what we cannot allow is injustice.”
The social chapter is described as one of the most extensive in the package. Among the proposed responses is the participation of the private sector—fiscally incentivized—in family support, pension payments, and other issues that the state banking system has been unable to resolve.
The professor Ana Teresa Badía even proposed, as mentioned in the discussion, the creation of a corporate social responsibility law for the private sector.
The regime asserted that "the State does not renounce social justice and aims to preserve it," although it acknowledged that to achieve this "it must have wealth to do so," an implicit admission of the model's failure thus far.
These figures contrast with numbers that the official system has acknowledged at other times: in February 2024, the Minister of Labor Marta Elena Feitó admitted to Díaz-Canel the existence of 1,236 communities living in misery in Cuba, while the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights reported that 89% of Cuban families suffer from extreme poverty.
The Cuban researcher José Raúl Gallego pointed out that none of the 176 measures address the country's sociopolitical system, which many analysts consider to be the structural root of the problems.
«The only thing the revolution cannot afford is injustice,» was the most striking statement of the debate, spoken in a context where the regime itself projects a GDP decline of 6.5% for 2026.
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