The Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz appeared before the National Assembly on June 18 to present a package of 176 economic and social transformations, and the phrase he chose to summarize them unwittingly revealed the deepest contradiction of the model that the regime has been defending for decades.
"We have decided to propose strategic impact transformations in the nation's economic and social model, without implying a renunciation of the preservation of the achievements of the Revolution," Marrero stated before parliament.
The Government of Cuba selected and shared that excerpt from Marrero's speech on its social media on Saturday. Additionally, they included a second line of message about who will maintain control of the country.
"Without ever renouncing Socialism, these transformations have been designed based on the guiding principle of doing what is necessary to preserve what is essential."
The contradiction is hard to conceal because what the regime now presents as the solution to save the revolution is, to a large extent, the same as what it banned or severely restricted for decades in the name of that very socialism.
Among the 176 measures approved by the National Assembly are decisions that would have been unthinkable in the official Cuban discourse of any previous era.
Among them are: authorization for private banking under the supervision of the Central Bank, the establishment of private exchange houses, the conversion of state-owned enterprises into joint-stock companies, the removal of the limit of 100 workers for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and the possibility for an individual to own multiple businesses.
The package also opens up the importation and marketing of fuels to the private sector, expands the participation of foreign capital and Cubans living abroad, and gradually replaces universal subsidies with supposed targeted assistance for retirees and vulnerable individuals, a long-standing measure that has not been implemented effectively.
Marrero admitted to the Assembly that the measures will create "contradictions," and the government will have to resolve them "on the go," without specifying how or when.
He identified four specific tensions: the impact of dollarization, the relationship between the removal of subsidies and the increase in prices, decentralization towards municipalities lacking management capacity, and the liberalization of agricultural prices without a proportional increase in production.
To justify the shift, Marrero referenced ideas attributed to Raúl Castro: not to be dogmatic, to separate socialism from egalitarianism, and to acknowledge that socialist planning must incorporate and regulate market rules.
The title of the official video of his intervention, published on YouTube by the Government, sums it up without ambiguity: "Transform to Save the Revolution and its Achievements."
The regime called for an extraordinary plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party on June 17, a day before the Assembly meeting, to pave the political way for the measures. After the announcement, Miguel Díaz-Canel supported the package with a brief statement: “We are not doing this because of pressure from the Yankees.”
What the regime calls "preserving the essential" implies, according to its own argument, adopting precisely the market mechanisms that it has defined as incompatible with Cuban socialism for decades.
The official slogan summarizes, perhaps unwittingly, 67 years of contradictions and distortions that have only served to repress and impoverish the Cuban people, while the Communist Party of Cuba and the historical leaders of the Revolution strengthen their power in the shadows.
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