The economist Pedro Monreal published an extensive analysis this Sunday in which he diagnosed a deep structural flaw in the Cuban regime's package of 176 measures: the absence of an axis dedicated to macroeconomic stabilization turns the program into a partial liberalization without a coherent direction.
The 176 measures were announced by the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel on June 11, 2026, and confirmed by the National Assembly in an extraordinary session held on the 18th and 19th of that month, organized into 23 thematic axes.
Among its most striking provisions are the authorization of private banking, the establishment of private exchange houses, the removal of the 100-worker limit for small and medium-sized enterprises (mipymes), and the possibility for a single individual to own more than one company.
For Monreal, the omission of macroeconomic stabilization as an independent axis was not an oversight, but rather a deliberate choice.
In that regard, he identified three assumptions that may have guided that decision:
- one technician: stabilization is conceived as a cross-cutting component scattered across various measures
- Political communication: the term "acute macroeconomic crisis" is avoided to maintain the narrative of "updating the model."
- and one of sequence: it is assumed that it is possible to change the rules of the economic game first and seek stabilization afterwards.
"This absence is not an inadvertent omission, but rather a deliberate decision of institutional and discursive design, and it proves to be problematic even under that interpretation," wrote the economist, summarizing his diagnosis with a striking image: "putting the cart before the horses."
The case of vegetable oil became the most visible symbol of the failure of that sequence.
Following the price liberalization —which removed the cap of 990 Cuban pesos per liter starting June 20— the product increased in price from around 1,500 pesos in April to over 4,000 pesos in August, with reports of up to 7,000 pesos in some areas.
The regime's response was to reintroduce provincial controls: Guantánamo and Holguín set prices at 2,200 pesos, Pinar del Río at 2,150, and Villa Clara at 2,500.
For Monreal, this reversal places Cuba's economic policy in a "structural limbo: without clear market rules, but also lacking macroeconomic stabilization or effective liberalization."
The dispersion of stabilization instruments across different axes, he adds, allows the regime to evade an explicit acknowledgment of the magnitude of the imbalance and to prioritize the narrative of structural transformation over the short-term adjustments it deems essential.
This is the latest review of an ongoing series. At the end of June, Monreal described the package as a “monster” or “deformed hybrid”, and in early August concluded that its only achievement was to “prove that they learned nothing”, directly referencing the return of price controls.
As a counterpoint, Monreal contrasted the official package with the Cuba Transformation proposal, developed since March 2026 by five Cuban economists — himself, Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, Ricardo Torres Pérez, and Pavel Vidal Alejandro — and publicly presented in July.
That proposal, consisting of about 120 pages, advocates for a monetary anchor based on strict control of money issuance and the verifiable limitation of monetary financing of the fiscal deficit, subordinating the exchange unification to that anchor.
Monreal warned that we should not dismiss a scenario in which "the deepening of imbalances in the coming weeks—worsening the decline in state production of goods and services, alongside rising prices—could lead to a revised package, with a greater number of measures and an additional axis of macroeconomic stabilization".
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