Cuba's National Assembly unanimously adopted 176 free-market economic reforms on Thursday, a dramatic concession by the island's Communist government as power blackouts stretch past 30 hours, food and medicine run short, and American pressure squeezes the regime from every direction.
Prime Minister Manuel Marrero unveiled the measures in what CBS News described as a landmark speech to the assembly. The reforms would end the requirement that foreign investors form joint ventures with the Cuban state, authorize large private enterprises for the first time, and allow both Cuban and foreign investors to acquire stakes in state-owned companies. The changes target banking, tourism, and agriculture, the sectors most visibly failing ordinary Cubans.
London-based Cuban economist Daniel Torralbas called the package "the most profound" since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. That is not a small claim. For more than six decades, the Cuban Communist Party treated private enterprise as ideological treason. Now, with the island running on fumes, literally, the party approved by show of hands what it once considered heretical.
The immediate trigger is an oil blockade the Trump administration imposed on Cuba in January, after the U.S.-backed ouster of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela stripped Havana of its most reliable patron. Since the start of the year, only one Russian oil tanker has docked in Cuba. The result: rolling blackouts that have become the norm, with outages routinely exceeding 30 hours.
The fuel crisis has driven Cuba's reserves to zero, compounding shortages of food, drinking water, and medicine that were already severe. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned that "children are dying" on the island because of a lack of medical supplies and medication.
Victor Hierrezuelo, a 63-year-old bank worker, put it more bluntly to Agence France-Presse on Thursday. Without reforms, he said, "the revolution will collapse!"
That is the kind of frank talk that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. It captures a reality Cuba's leaders can no longer paper over with revolutionary slogans.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel addressed the assembly on Wednesday, the day before the vote, and delivered a striking admission. He acknowledged "obstacles that don't come from outside, nor the blockade" and singled out "slowness, bureaucracy and norms that impede those who want to produce," along with "decisions that we have put off."
For a Cuban president to concede that the regime's own bureaucracy, not the U.S. embargo, has strangled productivity is a notable break from decades of reflexive blame-shifting. But Diaz-Canel could not resist reverting to form. He insisted Cuba was "not doing this because of pressure from the Yankees" but rather to "preserve" socialism.
He then closed the session by intoning Fidel Castro's famous revolutionary slogan: "Socialism or death!"
The contradiction speaks for itself. A government that just voted to let foreign investors buy into state companies does not get to pretend it is preserving the socialist model. It is abandoning it, under duress, piecemeal, and without admitting as much to its own people.
The reforms did not happen in a vacuum. The Trump administration has steadily tightened pressure on Havana through sanctions, asset freezes, and criminal charges. Last month, the U.S. indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges connected to Cuba's 1996 shoot-down of two civilian planes flown by a humanitarian group.
In early May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana to meet with senior Cuban officials, signaling American openness to expanding political dialogue. Multiple sources told CBS News that Ratcliffe brought along a paramilitary leader involved in the U.S. mission to capture Maduro, a detail that, if accurate, sent an unmistakable message about Washington's reach in the region.
Vice President JD Vance, asked Thursday whether Cuba was next on the administration's agenda, said Washington wanted Cubans to be "happy and successful."
"We're actually talking to the Cuban government right now about how they could change their ways to change that."
AP News reported that Vance elaborated further, saying that if Cuba's leaders "make smart decisions, we're going to have a much better relationship with that island." The same report noted that the reform plan was modeled in part after the market-oriented transitions pursued by China and Vietnam, Communist states that opened their economies while keeping one-party political control.
The European Union has added its own pressure. AP reported that the EU passed a resolution condemning Cuba's "systematic repression" and calling for sanctions against Diaz-Canel and the Cuban military-run business conglomerate GAESA.
Mario Gonzales, a 32-year-old restaurant manager in Havana's historic old town, said the reforms "offer hope." He expressed optimism about a possible revival in tourism, one of the few industries that could bring hard currency into the country quickly.
That hope is fragile. Marrero did not give a timeframe for implementing any of the 176 measures. Cuba's bureaucracy, the same one Diaz-Canel himself blamed for the crisis, will be responsible for executing reforms that fundamentally challenge its power and purpose. History offers little reason for confidence.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation remains dire. Power cuts lasting more than 30 hours have become routine. Food, fuel, and drinking water are scarce. The UN's warning about children dying from medical supply shortages has drawn international attention but no immediate relief.
Michael Bustamante, who chairs Cuban studies at the University of Miami, told Agence France-Presse that Cuba's leaders have never faced this level of pressure.
"Their backs are up against the wall as never before. They're in the uncomfortable position of making changes to their economic model, seemingly because of the pressure that's being exerted on them by the United States."
Diaz-Canel's insistence that the reforms are not a response to American pressure is difficult to square with the timeline. The oil blockade began in January. The CIA director visited Havana in May. The indictment of Raúl Castro came last month. And Cuba's Communist Party has been forced, step by step, into concessions it previously treated as ideological betrayal.
Three specific changes stand out from the 176 measures. Foreign investors will no longer need a Cuban state partner to operate on the island. Large private enterprises, long forbidden, will be authorized. And both domestic and foreign investors can acquire stakes in state companies. These are not cosmetic adjustments. They represent a fundamental shift in who controls economic activity in Cuba.
But the details remain thin. Which state companies will be open to investment? What regulatory framework will govern private enterprises? Will property rights be enforceable? Will the judiciary, an arm of the Communist Party, protect foreign capital? None of these questions were answered Thursday.
Nor did Marrero address the political dimension. Cuba remains a one-party state with a record of jailing dissidents, suppressing protests, and controlling information. Investors who have watched the regime threaten a "bloodbath" against perceived external threats may reasonably wonder whether their capital would be safe inside Cuba's borders.
The administration's own posture adds another layer of uncertainty. Washington has signaled it wants not just economic reform but a change in Cuba's leadership. Whether the adoption of market-oriented measures will satisfy American demands, or merely invite further pressure, remains an open question.
Cuba's economic collapse is not primarily the product of an American embargo, however much Havana's leaders repeat that line. It is the predictable result of a command economy that has spent six decades crushing private initiative, punishing entrepreneurship, and centralizing control in a bureaucracy that Diaz-Canel himself now admits is too slow, too rigid, and too obstructive to function.
The reforms adopted Thursday are an acknowledgment, however reluctant, that markets work and central planning does not. Every concession in the 176-measure package is something free-market economists have urged for decades. Private enterprise. Foreign investment without state partners. Ownership stakes in productive assets. These are not radical ideas. They are the baseline conditions of any functioning economy.
That Cuba's Communist Party adopted them unanimously, by show of hands, after years of ideological resistance, tells you everything about how desperate the situation has become. The party did not discover the virtues of free enterprise. It ran out of alternatives.
Diaz-Canel can close the session with "Socialism or death!" if he likes. But the 176 measures his own assembly just approved are a confession that socialism delivered the death, and only the market can offer a way back.
