The economist Pedro Monreal responded to the criticism received for the Cuba Transformación proposal with a thread of seven messages on X in which he rejected the argument that proposing a social market economy under the assumption of a peaceful solution with the United States implies a loss of national sovereignty.
"The criticism that proposing a social market economy and a democratic rule of law, under the assumption of a peaceful solution to the dispute with the U.S., implies a loss of sovereignty deserves a clear response, because it confuses sovereignty with isolation and authoritarianism," wrote Monreal in the first of his seven messages.
The economist clarified that the proposal does not rely on external factors for its internal coherence: "Cuba Transformación does not expect external solutions for the fundamental problems of Cuba. On the contrary, it starts from the premise that a credible internal change is the best way to redesign the relationship with the outside."
Monreal also defended the use of geopolitical scenarios as a valid methodological tool: "Using scenarios to assess the feasibility of a transformation is not a methodological flaw; it is a way to anticipate in an inevitably uncertain context."
One of the most direct arguments in the thread pointed to the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) as responsible for a conceptual distortion regarding sovereignty: "Reducing Cuban sovereignty to the interpretation of the PCC confuses the defense of a political system monopolized by a party with the full sovereignty of the people to freely decide their political and economic system."
The thread concluded with a question that summarizes the central thesis of the economist: “Can a people be called sovereign if they are prevented from peacefully changing their political system? Real sovereignty is affirmed by unleashing the talent, initiative, and freedoms of citizens.”
The criticisms that Monreal counters emerged after the full publication of Cuba Transformación, a 120-page document prepared by five Cuban economists —Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, Ricardo Torres Pérez, and Pavel Vidal Alejandro, along with Monreal himself— which proposes to replace the island's current economic model with a social market economy supported by a democratic rule of law.
The document, supported by the Cuba Study Group and the Observatory on the Cuban Economy, describes an economy in severe decline: in 2025, Cuba's real GDP remained below that of 2014 and was more than 15% lower than in 2018, while investment barely reached 7% of GDP compared to the Latin American average of 19%.
The proposal explicitly rejects the model of China or Vietnam —a reference that the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel has frequently pointed out— and demands that economic reforms be accompanied by political and institutional changes.
The text identifies the main obstacle to recovery not as the U.S. embargo, but rather the exhaustion of the economic system imposed by the dictatorship. It also criticizes successive governments for replacing internal reforms with external alliances, first with the Soviet Union and later with Venezuela.
The authors have clarified that the proposal is not intended to be a government program nor is it directed at Díaz-Canel's administration, but rather it offers, according to the document itself, "a coherent, realistic, and flexible analytical framework."
The plan is structured in three phases—emergency stabilization lasting about three years, productive and institutional recovery, and the consolidation of a new development model—and includes measures such as the reorganization of the military conglomerate GAESA, the elimination of the CUPET monopoly, and Cuba's reintegration into the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
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