The passing of former Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who died on Wednesday in Beijing at the age of 97, served as a starting point for Cuban economist Pedro Monreal to raise an uncomfortable question to the regime:
Monreal published his reflection on Thursday on his Facebook page The State as such, using the obituaries about Zhu to draw a parallel with the lack of technical leadership in the management of the Cuban economy.
The economist begins with the famous phrase attributed to Deng Xiaoping in 1992: "The current leaders do not understand economics... Zhu Rongji is the only one who understands economics," spoken when Zhu was still vice-premier.
Monreal specifies that Zhu was not an economist by academic training, but a technocrat whose prestige was built through practical experience: he worked at the Institute of Industrial Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was the founding dean of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University since 1984, and served as mayor and party secretary in Shanghai.
What Monreal highlights about Zhu's legacy is its concrete effectiveness: in June 1993, he promoted a package of "16 measures" for macroeconomic control that reduced Chinese inflation from a peak of nearly 24% in 1994 to levels between 0% and 1% in 1997-1998, without halting reform or opening up, achieving the so-called "soft landing" of the economy.
The contrast with Cuba is the core of the argument. The regime has referenced Chinese reform as a useful benchmark, but the package of 176 measures approved in June 2026 —organized into 23 axes— does not include any focused on macroeconomic stabilization.
According to Monreal, the term "inflation" appears only twice in the document without being linked to macroeconomic balance, and the word "stabilization" does not appear even once.
"What is the logic behind the fact that the package of 176 measures does not include a 'pillar' dedicated to macroeconomic stabilization?" asks the economist, adding: "How could the Cuban government take the Chinese reform seriously as a useful reference without acknowledging that macroeconomic stabilization is a key condition for undertaking structural transformations?"
Cuba is experiencing its second major failure in price policy in five years in 2026. The 2021 Tarea Ordenamiento resulted in an official inflation rate of 77.33% that year, far exceeding the projected 40%, and the regime itself eventually acknowledged its failure. The pattern repeats: the government lifted price caps through Resolution 150/2026 from the Ministry of Finance and Prices, but in less than two months provinces such as Villa Clara, Matanzas, Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, and Holguín reimposed controls on basic food items.
The reality underlying this cycle is devastating. The minimum wage was raised to 3,210 pesos per month since July 2026, but the basic basket is estimated at around 96,000 pesos per month, a gap of about 30 times. Official inflation reached 18.27% year-on-year in June 2026, and oil prices increased from around 1,500 pesos in April to over 4,000 pesos in August, peaking at up to 7,000 pesos per liter.
Monreal has described this cycle as a “legal looting” of Cuban workers and points out that workers' compensation as a percentage of GDP fell to an average of 26.7% after the Tarea Ordenamiento, compared to 35.6% recorded between 2003 and 2020.
Days earlier, the economist had warned that the 176 measures had only one achievement: "to show that they learned nothing", and described the return to provincial controls as "the new 'technical' trick of the bureaucracy" to shift to local authorities "the responsibility of correcting the blunder of the so-called 'liberalizing' policy of the central government."
Monreal concludes his publication with a question that offers no comfortable answer: "Which Cuban government official, from the rank of vice prime minister onward, disagreed with the 'consensus' that produced an economic transformation package without a macroeconomic 'axis'; where 'inflation' appears only twice, neither linked to macroeconomic balance, and where the term 'stabilization' is not mentioned even once?"
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