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The Cuban intellectual Julio César Guanche published an essay on his Facebook profile on Tuesday, June 23, titled "History and Inventory", in which he dismantles the official discourse surrounding the package of 176 economic measures presented by the regime on June 18 before the National Assembly.
Guanche opens with a distinction that sets the tone for the entire analysis: “One thing is history and another an inventory. If 1959 was history, 2026 seems to be an inventory.” For the essayist, the reforms—structured into 23 axes and affecting more than 148 legal provisions—represent the deepest transformation toward the market since the triumph of the Revolution, although the official document presents it as a “sovereign exercise to preserve the achievements of the Revolution without renouncing socialism.”
The textual analysis he proposes is revealing: the word "worker" does not appear in any of the 23 axes; "union" appears only once, to limit salaries to the economic capacity of the company; and the "Socialist State Enterprise" is instructed to transform into a "joint-stock commercial company." His conclusion is straightforward: "The signifier remains, but the referent changes."
What the document does not name, argues Guanche, has a precise name: structural adjustment. Its central measures—price liberalization, private banking, VAT, devaluations, elimination of universal subsidies, and unrestricted openness to foreign investment—are what global monetary institutions typically prescribe in their stabilization programs.
Based on that diagnosis, the essayist outlines three hypothetical scenarios. The first, a socialist renewal with workers' control, is outright dismissed: "Workers' control in Cuba is a fantasy." Since the sixties, state socialism has eliminated labor self-organization, and when the party hierarchy is reorganized, he warns, "workers' control does not arise: what arises is the transformation of administrative power into property."
The second scenario is a negotiated transition from the top among the regime's elites. Its structural limit, he points out, is corruption: the former vice prime minister Alejandro Gil Fernández was dismissed in February 2024 and investigated for espionage, embezzlement, bribery, money laundering, and influence peddling.
The third path is a transition subordinate to Washington, driven by the embargo, the fuel cutoff since January 2026, the criminal charges against Raúl Castro, and the sanctions on GAESA. Guanche warns that Venezuela provides the script: the regime change did not improve wages nor resolve the electricity crisis, but it did reform the laws to open the model to foreign capital, which a sociologist described as the formalization of a "predatory and dispossessive economy."
The three scenarios share, according to Guanche, a common logic: the document creates private economic actors that the one-party system cannot represent without transforming itself. The implicit pact is one of "developmental authoritarianism": economic freedom in exchange for political obedience. Miguel Díaz-Canel himself stated, according to the essayist, without realizing its implications: "The first thing we need to do is produce. If we do not produce, if we do not generate wealth [...] what social justice are we going to defend?"
The essay also denounces the exclusions that the 176 measures of the regime do not address: nearly one in two working-age Cuban women is outside the formal market, racial stratification persists in the distribution of wealth, and the document replaces the words poverty and inequality with "multidimensional vulnerability," delegating its correction to the voluntary responsibility of companies and communities.
Behind those omissions lies a humanitarian crisis with striking figures: infant mortality rose from 4.0 to 9.9 per thousand live births between 2018 and 2025; childhood cancer survival dropped from 85% to 65% due to a lack of chemotherapy drugs; over 12,000 children are awaiting surgery without supplies; and more than half of essential medications are unavailable. For Guanche, this suffering has become a geopolitical tool: "pain turned into a geopolitical bargaining chip."
The reforms, the essayist concludes, arrive too late and reach a society that the protests of July 11, 2021, have already shown to be disempowered. "Society reaches this moment disempowered, without its own political organization, and unable to endure any further material hardship," he writes. His conclusion offers no room for ambiguity: "The scenarios may be hypothetical. The tragedy of the crisis, its self-serving exploitation, and the lack of capacity of the Cuban people to intervene in its outcomes are not."
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