The Cuban economist Pedro Monreal accused the regime of subjecting workers on the island to a "legal looting," as a result of economic policies that have eroded salaries, pensions, and savings, while the responsible officials avoid facing the consequences of their decisions.
In an analysis published this Wednesday on the online platform Substack, Monreal argues that Cuba is experiencing the second major failure of government price policy in just five years, following the inflation triggered by the Tarea Ordenamiento in 2021.
The economist starts from a recent contradiction: the government announced the elimination of price caps within the package of 176 measures regulated by Resolution 150/2026 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices, but less than two months later, several provinces reinstated controls.
Villa Clara, Matanzas, Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, and Holguín have established "reference prices" or limits on profit margins for basic foods such as oil, eggs, powdered milk, sugar, chicken, and rice.
For Monreal, transferring those decisions to local governments now allows the central power to distance itself from the failure of its policy.
"It is the new 'technical' trick of the bureaucracy: an updated version of the 'design deviation' that was used as a smokescreen in 2021, which now allows the PCC, the presidency, and the Council of Ministers to pass the responsibility for correcting the blunder of the supposed 'liberalizing' policy of the central government onto local authorities—with populist theatrics," he stated.
The problem, according to Monreal, goes far beyond deciding whether prices should be regulated or deregulated. In his view, the government insists on treating them "as variables of political control, not as mechanisms for information and economic adjustment."
The economist finds a parallel with the Tarea Ordenamiento, implemented in 2021 and accompanied that year by an official inflation rate of 77.33%.
Then, the authorities attributed the problems to a "deviation from the original design." Five years later, Monreal believes that the government is repeating the same pattern: intervening in prices without first addressing the insufficient production and supply of food.
"Attempting to modify relative prices without first restoring the actual food supply is akin to manipulating the thermometer while ignoring the fever," he warned.
Setting prices without recovering the supply, he argues, does not eliminate scarcity or inflation; rather, it can shift products to the informal market and accumulate pressures that eventually manifest in different ways.
Monreal also points to one of the structural causes of the problem: the limited investment allocated to the agricultural sector. During the first seven years of the current government, this represented an average of only 4% of the total investment, compared to the 7% recorded between 2008 and 2017.
Salaries and pensions that lose value
The greatest cost of those decisions, he warns, is being borne by the Cubans.
Following the Task of Ordering, workers' compensation as a percentage of GDP dropped to an average of 26.7%, compared to 35.6% recorded between 2003 and 2020. Monreal interprets this reduction as "an intensification of surplus extraction in favor of state accumulation."
But behind those percentages, he insists, there are direct consequences for families who have seen the real value of their income disappear.
"The retiree who saved for years and relied on a pension, or the worker earning a salary who now sees their purchasing power dissolve, are not abstractions; they are specific individuals with family situations and concrete histories of contributing to society, witnessing as their personal and family well-being evaporates," he noted.
In a country where more than 70% of family spending goes to food, the combination of low production, inflation, and depreciated wages makes any new pricing policy a matter directly linked to daily survival.
Monreal concludes by holding both officials and lawmakers accountable for economic decisions whose costs, he claims, ultimately fall on the population.
"Cuban workers have been victims of a legal plunder that results from the decisions of officials and parliamentarians who do not feel accountable and who conceal their blind obedience to the 'superior leading force' (the PCC) and their incompetence under the current technical terminology."
And it concludes with a rather pessimistic warning about the possibility of accountability for the results: "It is unlikely that they will take responsibility for the disaster."
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