A Cuban deputy featured this week in one of the most revealing interventions of the Seventh Ordinary Session of the National Assembly of People's Power (ANPP), held on July 29 and 30 at the Palace of Conventions in Havana.
Instead of proposing or discussing agenda items, the deputy Orlando Gutiérrez Boza used his turn to persuade his colleagues that implementing capitalist measures is, in fact, a revolutionary act.
The parliamentary session was convened to follow up on the package of 176 economic and social transformations approved on June 18, 2026, the largest set of reforms to the Cuban model in decades, which includes private banking, private currency exchange, opening up to foreign franchises, and the conversion of state enterprises into joint stock companies.
“Being objective, doing what needs to be done in this moment, is 'being revolutionary'. In other words, all these measures, even if it seems otherwise, even with nostalgia in the air, or if someone said this or that... No, the revolutionary who lived through this moment we are experiencing, does what we are doing,” stated Gutiérrez Boza before the cameras of Canal Caribe.
The sentence summarizes the contradiction that the regime faces: for decades it fought capitalism as an ideological enemy, and now its own representatives must explain to the public why introducing it is an act of revolutionary loyalty.
Miguel Díaz-Canel, the "continuity" of the so-called revolution and first secretary of the Communist Party, admitted in June that the reforms would incorporate "more elements of private ownership, private production, capitalism, and the market," although he denied a "capitalist restoration.
For his part, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz insisted before the Assembly this Thursday that Cuba “does not deviate from the socialist model”.
Gutiérrez Boza, a graduate in Medical Sciences, former deputy director of the Center for Neurosciences and representative of the People's Power, did not present any concrete legislative proposals.
The session was not the only one to offer moments of unsubstantial propaganda. The troubadour and deputy Nelson Valdés Viera referred to Díaz-Canel as «our leader» and «a father» during Tuesday's event, and also greeted Raúl Castro, who reportedly participated via videoconference.
This pattern is not new. The ANPP has been approving laws and agreements unanimously for decades, with no opposing votes or real debate, as Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged in July 2024, boasting of being that “rare dictatorship that the enemies of the revolution will never understand.”
What is indeed unprecedented is the magnitude of the contradiction that the regime is trying to manage: a system that claims to be socialist while implementing reforms that its own leaders describe as capitalist, and that needs to convince its legislators —and through them, the population— that this is not only acceptable but also revolutionary.
At the close of the session, 110 out of the 121 measures scheduled for June and July had already been approved, a 90.9% progress that the Assembly ratified with not a single vote against.
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