The leader Miguel Díaz-Canel defended this Friday the progress of the 176 economic and social transformations approved in June, and insisted that the process is irreversible with a phrase that summarizes the regime's stance: "The challenge is significant, but we will not be stopped."
The president resumed his official podcast "From the Presidency," and this time he was joined by the Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and the Minister of Justice Rosabel Gamón Verde, who provided the most detailed update to date on the implementation of the reforms, three months after their approval during an extraordinary session of the National Assembly.
Marrero Cruz summarized the work carried out between July and September: 160 implementation proposals were designed and 197 legal regulations were approved to support them, including four laws, 29 decree-laws, and 26 decrees from the Council of Ministers.
The prime minister also announced that during that period more than 3,600 new small and medium enterprises (mipymes) were approved, bringing the total to 16,100 in the country, along with 448 non-state cooperatives and over 385,000 self-employed workers.
However, Marrero himself acknowledged the central contradiction of the process: "We already have the path open to move forward; and in fact, progress is being made and results are already being seen, although it is not yet reflected in an improvement in the quality of life of the population."
The ideological axis of the episode was, once again, the denial that the reforms represent a shift towards capitalism, a position that the regime has maintained from day one despite the fact that the actual content of the package includes private banking, private exchange houses, the buying and selling of shares in state companies, partial dollarization, and the removal of the limit on workers for mipymes, mechanisms that economists and independent analysts describe as characteristic of market economies.
Marrero stated that the transformations "perfect and strengthen our socialism" and that it is "a completely sovereign decision" that does not respond to external pressures.
Díaz-Canel, for his part, framed the urgency of the reforms within what the regime calls a "multidimensional war" against Cuba: "economic, ideological, cultural, and communicational," attributing the main obstacles to development to the U.S. embargo and Washington's "coercive measures."
The Minister of Justice was even more emphatic about the nature of the process: "This process is irreversible. The transformations have begun, they have the highest political approval, and there is no turning back; no one is authorized to do anything against them."
Official optimism clashes with an economic reality that the regime itself cannot fully conceal. The CEPAL projects a decline of the Cuban GDP by 10.3% in 2026, the worst in Latin America, while year-on-year inflation reached 25.19% in August, with food prices rising by 36.01%.
The minimum wage is equivalent to less than five dollars on the unofficial exchange rate, and Cuba has experienced eight nationwide blackouts throughout the year. Economist Elías Amor described the package of reforms, just one day before the release of the podcast, as “a complete deception”.
The regime itself acknowledged in internal opinion studies that part of the population perceives that the benefits of the transformations only reach those who have money, and that the worsening of inequalities generates rejection.
Marrero promised that by 2027 the results will be evident: "Next year we will start with a level of progress and a level of results that our people will truly be able to appreciate."
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