The user L. Eduardo Domínguez posted on Facebook this Monday an analysis that contrasts seven economic promises of the regime with the reality faced by the Cuban population, in a recount that ranged from stores with hard currency to the electrical crisis.
"Today, I just want to jog your memory a bit, in case the senior executives forget what they promised," Domínguez wrote at the beginning of a post that reviews the main failures of Cuban economic policy between 2019 and 2026.
The first target is the establishment of stores in Freely Convertible Currency (MLC). In July 2020, according to the official Granma, officials from Tiendas Caribe and CIMEX stated that there would only be 72 establishments for medium and high-end products, without displacing the supply in Cuban pesos. What followed was the opposite: chicken, oil, and hygiene items disappeared from the national currency markets and migrated to the shelves that required foreign currency.
The promise that the currency captured would replenish the market in pesos also failed to materialize. "The markets in CUP were never replenished," states Domínguez, who points out that the MLC stores themselves ended up collapsing while the regime expanded sales directly in dollars. By May 2025, at least 80 stores were operating exclusively in dollars, far exceeding the limit that the authorities had promised not to surpass.
On the topic of dollarization, the contrast is even more striking. In October 2020, the then-Minister of Economy, Alejandro Gil, stated during the Round Table that "Cuba will not dollarize its economy" and that the MLC stores were "necessary but temporary." Years later, the regime itself acknowledged a "partial and temporary dollarization," while the dollar spread to commerce, services, telecommunications, and even gasoline.
Another point of the analysis refers to the Ordering Task of December 2020, whose directive was "subsidize people, not products." The elimination of universal subsidies, combined with inflation that closed 2024 at 24.88% year-on-year according to the National Office of Statistics, left workers and pensioners without real economic protection. The UN linked this reform to the worsening of the food crisis in the Island.
The slogan of import substitution, repeated at every Congress of the Communist Party for decades, receives similar treatment. Cuban agricultural and industrial production has seen declines of over 30% and 50% respectively, and today Cuba imports more than 80% of the food it consumes, with an expenditure close to 2.5 billion dollars annually.
The "tarifazo" by ETECSA in May 2025 —which limited recharges in pesos to 360 monthly and launched plans in dollars— was justified by company executives as a step towards "self-financing" to modernize infrastructure. More than a year later, ETECSA collects millions while the service is sinking: mobile phone service experiences constant drops exacerbated by power outages and the lack of energy autonomy from the radio bases.
The final point of the report addresses the program of 92 photovoltaic solar parks announced in 2024, with a total capacity of 2,000 MW. The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, promised in December of that year that from June 2025, daytime electricity demand would be met. The reality in 2026 is different: the National Electric System reports deficits exceeding 2,000 MW, outages lasting between 30 and 40 continuous hours in Havana and up to 70 hours in other provinces, and at least six total system collapses so far this year.
Domínguez concluded his post with an open invitation: "Leave me in the comments other broken promises, and I will add them." The comments started pouring in, with users sharing their own memories of historical shortcomings and agreeing that the regime's tactic has always been the same: "to make us lose our sense of time" with recycled resolutions that never lead to real improvements.
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