Cuban economist Pedro Monreal accused the regime of subjecting the island's workers to a "legal plundering," a result of economic policies that have eroded wages, pensions, and savings, while the responsible officials evade accountability for 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 begins with a recent contradiction: the government announced the removal 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 staple 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 policies.
"It is the new 'technical' ploy of the bureaucracy: an updated version of the 'design deviation' that was used as a fig leaf in 2021, which now allows the PCC, the presidency, and the Council of Ministers to theatrically shift the responsibility for correcting the blunder of the so-called 'liberalizing' policy of the central government onto local authorities," he stated.
The problem, according to Monreal, goes far beyond deciding whether prices should be regulated or liberalized. 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 Ordering Task, implemented in 2021 and accompanied that year by an official inflation rate of 77.33% —as reported at the time by ONEI— regarding which Monreal warned about the severe deterioration of purchasing power.
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.
"Trying to modify relative prices without having previously restored the real supply of food is like 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 push products into the informal market and create pressures that eventually manifest in other ways.
Monreal also points to one of the structural causes of the problem: the low investment allocated to the agricultural sector. During the first seven years of the current government, this accounted for an average of only 4% of 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 paid by the Cubans.
After the Task of Ordering, workers' compensation as a percentage of GDP dropped to an average of 26.7%, compared to the 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 contribution to society, witnessing their personal and familial well-being evaporate," he noted.
In a country where more than 70% of family spending goes to food, the combination of low production, inflation, and depreciated salaries makes any new pricing policy a matter directly linked to everyday survival.
Monreal concludes by holding both officials and parliamentarians responsible 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 cover up their blind obedience to the 'superior guiding force' (the PCC) and their incompetence under the technical term of the moment."
And it concludes with a rather unoptimistic warning about the possibility of accountability for the results: "It is unlikely that they will take responsibility for the disaster."
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