Miguel Díaz-Canel again criticized “the elites that are becoming obscenely wealthy” during his speech for the 26th of July.
The sentence aimed to denounce the inequalities of capitalism, but ended up highlighting one of the biggest contradictions of the official discourse: the growing social gap that exists today within Cuba.
«The elites are becoming obscenely rich,» the leader stated while referring to other countries. However, the description reported by Cubadebate increasingly aligns with the reality of an island where a minority connected to the political, military, and business elite enjoys a standard of living unattainable for the vast majority of Cubans.
While Díaz-Canel called for collective sacrifice and resistance against the U.S. embargo, millions of Cubans continue to face daily blackouts, shortages of food and medicine, uncontrolled inflation, salaries that cannot meet basic needs, and an unprecedented migration exodus.
The new elite of Cuban socialism
The official narrative has maintained for decades that the so-called "revolution" eliminated the deep inequalities that existed before 1959. However, present-day Cuba presents a very different picture.
In Havana and other cities, exclusive restaurants, luxury bars, high-end cars, renovated mansions, and private businesses catered to a clientele with high purchasing power are proliferating.
At the same time, the majority of the population stands in long lines to obtain basic food items, survives on state salaries equivalent to just a few dollars a month, and endures prolonged power outages.
Social media has also made this divide visible. Businesspeople close to power, officials, sympathetic artists, and new economic actors showcase travels, luxury watches, exclusive dinners, and properties that starkly contrast with the everyday life of most Cubans.
One of the most recent examples of that disconnect was embodied by Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as "El Cangrejo" and the grandson of Raúl Castro, who in a recent interview with defended the lifestyle he enjoys and admitted: "It pains me that many people cannot live like I do. I feel for how people struggle. And I work every day to change that situation."
In that same conversation, he envisioned a Cuba where any citizen could enter a supermarket and purchase products like foie gras, an image that many interpreted as the reflection of the vast distance between the privileged elite and a population that today spends hours trying to obtain basic food items.
The reference to foie gras ultimately became, for many Cubans, a metaphor for the abyss that divides those who can aspire to luxury products from those who can barely find chicken, oil, rice, or basic medications.
Economic reforms are redefining ownership
The contradiction becomes even more evident because Díaz-Canel's own government is currently promoting a broad package of 176 Economic and Social Transformations, presented as the largest update to the economic model in decades.
Although they are officially presented as a modernization of socialism, many economists believe that these measures are also laying the groundwork for a profound redistribution of property.
The concern does not solely lie in economic opening, but in who will be in a position to acquire companies, state assets, participate in future privatizations, or take advantage of new investment opportunities.
In a country where access to credit, foreign currency, licenses, and a significant portion of economic activity continues to depend on political decisions, many analysts warn that the main beneficiaries will be individuals close to the power structures, high-ranking officials, executives of state enterprises, military personnel, and entrepreneurs with privileged connections.
In other words, while for decades the regime fought against private property in the name of equality, it now risks facilitating the concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite closely tied to the political system itself.
A capitalism of privileges
The paradox is difficult to overlook.
For years, the Cuban regime justified economic restrictions by claiming it aimed to prevent the emergence of large private fortunes. However, the current reality points to a model where opportunities depend more on access to power than on the market.
Without independent institutions, full legal security, and equal conditions for competition, economic opening could end up consolidating a capitalism of privileges instead of an open and competitive economy.
The contrasts are becoming increasingly visible between those who frequent luxury hotels, exclusive restaurants, or upscale neighborhoods and those who survive on insufficient pensions or salaries that barely cover a few days' worth of food.
A phrase that ended up describing Cuba
That's why, when Díaz-Canel stated that "the elites enrich themselves obscenely," many Cubans did not think of other countries.
They thought of those who travel in luxury vehicles while public transport collapses; of those who enjoy exclusive dinners while millions struggle to put food on the table; of those who amass wealth while hundreds of thousands of Cubans emigrate in search of opportunities that they cannot find in their own country.
The phrase was intended as a critique of capitalism. But it ended up, perhaps unintentionally, as an increasingly recognizable description of the Cuba that has emerged under the very model that Díaz-Canel defends: a society where inequality is no longer an exception, but rather a reality that grows in tandem with a new economic elite closely tied to power.
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