Walking the tightrope under siege: Cuba’s reforms and the defence of socialist sovereignty
First published at Canadian Dimension.
The announcement of Cuba’s new package of economic transformations has generated intense debate both within Cuba and among supporters of the Revolution internationally. Some have expressed concern that aspects of the reforms represent a retreat toward capitalism, a weakening of socialist principles, or even a concession to the relentless pressure of US imperialism. Such concerns should not be dismissed. They arise from a genuine commitment to the principles that have defined the Cuban Revolution and an understandable apprehension about the dangers that accompany any expansion of market mechanisms.
Yet the starting point for any serious analysis must be reality. Cuba confronts one of the most severe economic crises in its contemporary history. This crisis is not the product of abstract policy failures alone, nor can it be understood apart from the unprecedented escalation of the US economic war against the island. Washington’s objective remains unchanged: to create such hardship, deprivation, and social dislocation that the Cuban people abandon their revolutionary project and surrender their sovereignty.
For more than six decades, successive US administrations have sought to achieve through economic warfare what they could not accomplish through invasion, sabotage, terrorism, diplomatic isolation, or political subversion: the destruction of the Cuban Revolution. The current phase of that assault has reached extraordinary levels. Cuba faces financial persecution, restrictions on fuel imports, obstacles to international banking transactions, sanctions against foreign investors, and a campaign explicitly designed to suffocate the country’s economy.
Under such circumstances, the Cuban revolutionary leadership could not simply stand still. To do nothing would itself have been a decision—a decision carrying potentially devastating consequences for the Cuban people and for the survival of the Revolution. As Cuban economists and policymakers have repeatedly noted, many of the measures now being implemented have been debated for decades. Indeed, part of the current crisis stems from reforms that were delayed, only partially implemented, or obstructed by institutional inertia. The cost of inaction has been enormous.
The question therefore is not whether changes were necessary. They were. The real question is what kind of changes are being implemented, under whose authority, and for what purpose.
Some critics view measures such as expanded foreign investment, modifications to foreign trade arrangements, greater flexibility for state enterprises, and new forms of financing as evidence of capitalist restoration. Such conclusions are premature and often misunderstand the central issue confronting socialist societies.
Socialism has never been built under ideal conditions. Neither Marx nor Engels imagined that socialist construction would occur in a small developing country subjected to permanent siege by the world’s most powerful imperial state. Every socialist revolution has been forced to navigate contradictions, shortages, external threats, and difficult compromises. The history of revolutionary movements is not the history of advancing under perfect conditions; it is the history of defending emancipatory projects under hostile conditions.
Lenin confronted precisely this reality in 1921. After years of civil war, foreign intervention, economic collapse, and devastation, Soviet Russia introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP permitted limited private enterprise, market exchange, and concessions to foreign capital. It was fiercely debated within the revolutionary movement. Yet Lenin insisted that the decisive issue was not the existence of market mechanisms in isolation, but which class held political power and whether the socialist state retained command over the strategic direction of society.
The NEP was not viewed as a surrender. It was understood as a strategic retreat designed to preserve revolutionary power, rebuild productive capacity, and gain time under extremely unfavourable conditions.
History never repeats itself mechanically, and Cuba is not Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, the comparison is instructive. Revolutionary governments occasionally face circumstances in which tactical flexibility becomes necessary to preserve strategic objectives.
The decisive question remains: who controls the state? The Cuban Revolution has not relinquished political power to domestic capitalists, foreign corporations, or international financial institutions. Cuba remains a sovereign state governed by institutions created through the revolutionary process. The Communist Party remains in leadership. The state retains control over the commanding heights of the economy. National independence remains non-negotiable.
This distinction is crucial. The issue is not whether market mechanisms exist. Markets exist in varying forms in virtually every society. The decisive question is for whom the social product is generated and how the social surplus is utilized.
Is wealth produced for private accumulation by a narrow elite? Or is it directed toward national development, social welfare, public health, education, scientific advancement, food security, and collective wellbeing?
That is the central dividing line between socialist-oriented development and capitalist restoration. Those worried about the weakening of the state monopoly on foreign trade raise legitimate concerns. History demonstrates that openings to market forces can generate inequalities and social pressures. Similarly, proposals involving greater participation of foreign investment and changes in enterprise structures deserve careful scrutiny.
There are real dangers. No serious revolutionary should deny them. There is the danger of growing inequalities. There is the danger of bureaucratic distortions. There is the danger of the emergence of privileged sectors. There is the danger that market incentives, if left unchecked, could gradually reshape social relations in ways inconsistent with socialist objectives.
But dangers alone cannot determine policy. The alternative to confronting these risks is not some idealized preservation of a previous status quo. The alternative may well be deepening economic collapse, worsening shortages, increased emigration, deterioration of public services, and the weakening of the material foundations upon which the Revolution rests. The challenge is therefore not to avoid all risk — a practical impossibility — but to manage those risks while preserving revolutionary power.
In this regard, an important aspect of the current debate concerns alternatives that deepen worker participation, cooperative development, community control, and democratic forms of economic management. These discussions deserve serious attention. Cuba’s future need not be reduced to a choice between bureaucratic centralization and private capital accumulation. Expanding the role of workers, cooperatives, municipalities, and communities in economic decision-making remains an essential component of socialist renewal.
Indeed, the debate itself demonstrates an often-overlooked reality: Cuba continues to grapple openly with fundamental questions about the direction of its development. The Revolution has never claimed infallibility. Cuban leaders have repeatedly acknowledged errors, shortcomings, delays, and bureaucratic obstacles. The current reforms emerge not from ideological conversion to capitalism but from a recognition that existing mechanisms have proven insufficient under present conditions.
Ultimately, however, the principal contradiction remains external. The greatest threat to Cuban socialism is not the ongoing debate among revolutionaries about economic policy. The greatest threat remains the unrelenting campaign by Washington — including the real possibility of military aggression — to force Cuba into submission. This is why international solidarity remains indispensable.
Those outside Cuba have every right — and indeed a responsibility — to discuss, debate, and critically evaluate developments on the island. But such discussions must begin from an unequivocal defence of Cuba’s right to determine its own future free from imperial coercion.
The Cuban people alone have the right to decide how their society evolves. Not Washington. Not Wall Street. Not the architects of blockade and economic warfare.
The irony is that many of those demanding a return to capitalism for Cuba preside over capitalist societies increasingly incapable of delivering security, equality, or hope for future generations. Across the capitalist world, growing numbers of people face declining living standards, mounting insecurity, precarious employment, and diminishing prospects for their children. The promise and illusion that capitalism would provide prosperity for all has become increasingly difficult to sustain even in its historic centres.
Against this backdrop, Cuba’s struggle remains what it has always been: the effort to preserve national sovereignty and social justice under extraordinarily hostile conditions. The current measures should therefore be understood neither as a capitulation nor as an abandonment of socialist aspirations. They are better understood as an attempt — whether ultimately successful or not — to navigate a perilous moment in defence of a revolutionary project that continues to face the concentrated hostility of the most powerful empire in history.
The debate over the reforms will continue. It should. But the first question must never be forgotten: what would happen if Cuba did nothing? The Revolution was never confronted with a choice between an ideal socialism and imperfect reforms. It was confronted with the challenge of defending socialist sovereignty amid economic siege.
That reality imposes urgent and necessary changes. The task now is to ensure that those changes strengthen rather than weaken the Revolution’s foundational commitment: a sovereign nation in which the wealth produced by society serves the many rather than the few, national development rather than foreign domination, and human needs rather than private profit.
Isaac Saney is a professor in the Department of History at Dalhousie University and a specialist in Cuba and Black Studies. He is also a member of the executive of the Canadian Network on Cuba.
Cuba: History and inventory
First published in Spanish at La Cosa. Translation by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
History is one thing; an inventory is another. If 1959 was history, 2026 seems like an inventory. The package of 176 measures across 23 areas presented to the National Assembly on June 18 represents the most significant market-oriented reform since 1959. More than 148 legal provisions are affected, leaving almost no sector of the economy untouched.
Many of these measures have been demanded by a broad spectrum of people for a long time, including: decentralisation, ending the dual currency system, small-scale land ownership, markets, and municipal autonomy. What follows is not an argument against them, but an examination of their impacts.
First, a simple textual analysis of the document, presented as a “sovereign exercise to preserve the Revolution’s achievements without renouncing socialism.”
The word “worker” does not appear in the document’s 23 key sections. “Trade union” appears once, solely to cap wages at a company’s “economic and financial capacity.” “Socialism” is relegated to rhetoric; in the technical measures, it survives as a label, “Socialist State Enterprise”, which the document orders be “transformed … into a joint-stock company.” The signifier remains, but the significate changes.
The significate taking its place has a name, though it is not used in the document: structural adjustment, albeit a heterodox one. Its key measures — price liberalisation, private banking, VAT [Value Added Tax], successive devaluations accompanied by liquidating companies that “cannot withstand” the adjustment, eliminating universal subsidies and unrestricted openness to foreign investment — are normally recommended by global financial institutions’ stabilisation programs.
The stated difference lies in the pace and nominal retention of state ownership over “fundamental” sectors, a category the document does not define. It does, however, define the mechanism for their transfer: separating ownership (which remains “social”) from management (which becomes “non-state”). In practice, this is similar to how China and Vietnam enabled private accumulation within formal public structures.
“Market” appears about 20 times. Beyond the finer detail, the social safeguards accompanying it — a fund started with “a portion” of the savings from scrapping subsidies, social responsibility delegated to the private sector, and three-to-six months’ wages severance pay — present, once again, a sequencing problem: scrapping energy and transport subsidies will trigger immediate inflation, eroding the Fund before it even becomes operational.
There are three hypothetical paths from here.
The first is a “renewal” of socialism, ideally with workers’ control, as demanded by Marxist left sectors. In the 1970s and ’80s, Cuba achieved health and education indicators far above its income level. It sent troops to Angola and Cuito Cuanavale, helping militarily defeat Apartheid. [South African anti-Apartheid leader] Nelson Mandela said “the decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces [in Angola] destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor”, travelling to the island in 1991 to express his gratitude in person. This is part of Cuban socialism’s legacy; workers’ control in Cuba, however, is a fantasy.
The left had a real working-class base before 1959: anarcho-syndicalism dominated the labour movement until the 1920s; Communists, Trotskyists and the PSP [Popular Socialist Party] later supported trade unions and strikes. After the 1960s, state socialism triumphed — with top-down planning, centralised power, and limited self-organisation. When the party hierarchy reorganises rather than collapses, workers’ control is not the outcome; instead, administrative power is converted into ownership.
The second possible path is a negotiated transition from above: regime elites negotiating with economic groups that have emerged under their wing, with a gradual opening rather than a rupture. Other post-Communist transitions show that the model’s limits is that without political reform, the opening inevitably stalls or is reversed.
Cuba also has a specific flaw that often accompanies these processes: corruption. Former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy Alejandro Gil Fernández was dismissed in February 2024 for “serious errors”. He was investigated for espionage, embezzlement, bribery, money laundering and influence peddling. With leaks of this magnitude, the question is not whether the pact will hold, but on which side loyalties lie.
The third hypothetical scenario is transitioning towards subordination to Washington. Cuba is not Venezuela — it does not as much oil nor comparable armed forces — but the blockade, the cutting off of fuel imports since January, the US charges against Raúl Castro and sanctions on Gaesa [a Cuban conglomerate owned by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces] means the US is pushing Cuba towards subordination.
Venezuela provided the blueprint: regime change did not improve wages or resolve the electricity crisis; instead, the immediate changes were to laws, with hydrocarbon and mining reforms opening them up to foreign capital — formalising an “economy of plunder and dispossession,” according to sociologist Emiliano Terán Mantovani. Gaesa, Cuba’s ports and nickel are the Cuban hub of this hemispheric operation.
The three paths share a common foundation: the document creates the conditions for private economic actors with their own interests, whose representation the one-party system cannot accommodate without transforming itself. The implicit pact is a developmental authoritarianism — economic freedom in exchange for political obedience.
Cuba President Miguel Díaz-Canel said as much, perhaps unintentionally: “Without wealth, there is nothing to distribute … If there is no wealth, there is no social justice, and everything else is a fairy tale.” Subordinating social justice to wealth production has been a liberal capitalist tenet for two centuries. That this is presented as the foundation of Cuban socialism in 2026 is not a contradiction in discourse; it runs right through the document.
Behind these scenarios lies an older problem: a democratic political economy demands two things Cuba has failed to combine: political inclusion and the state’s real capacity to accumulate wealth in order to distribute social rights. Cuba has tried three different ways of failing on both counts in its past three constitutions.
The 1940 Constitution promised social democracy without a state capable of delivering it: of the 70 complementary laws enacted, only 10 were passed in a decade. It fostered political inclusion but not the promised effective redistribution (the 1952 coup also stifled that possibility).
The 1976 Constitution built up distributive capacities — health, education, social security — but on the basis of the single party as the “supreme leading force”: it generated redistribution but institutionalised political exclusion. Although it was announced in 2018 that PCC [Cuban Communist Party] membership would no longer be a prerequisite for holding political office, the party and its youth wing account for 14% of the electoral roll but 95% of MPs.
The 2019 Constitution recognised private property and the market without the political rights to make decisions on these, without effective tax mechanisms to tie them to redistribution, and without an accumulation model — involving state-owned and private enterprises as well as foreign investment — capable of converting them into a source of social rights. More than five years after it came into effect, Cuban courts still do not recognise its direct legal force — “exactly as happened with its predecessor,” according to José Walter Mondelo García and Julio César Guanche Zaldívar — with only two of more than 140 applications filed for constitutional protection being accepted for consideration.
Today’s expanding market does not redistribute: it concentrates. In the first quarter of 2021, more than half of all state investment went into tourism and property, but barely 1% to innovation. The reform document makes no mention of poverty or inequality: it calls them “multidimensional vulnerability” and delegates their resolution to economic actors — both state and private — “as part of their social responsibility at the community level.”
This exclusion is compounded by others. Unpaid care work continues to fall disproportionately on women: almost one in two Cuban women of working age are outside the formal labour force, and although there are more women with university degrees, they have less economic autonomy and are under-represented in better-paid sectors. The 23 pillars say nothing about this; they delegate it, like other social safeguards, as a voluntary responsibility of businesses and communities.
Racial stratification persists in wealth, symbolic recognition and institutional power. Given Cuba’s migration history, the diaspora of remittances and capital for new private businesses is disproportionately white. An open market that fails to address these exclusions does not redistribute wealth: it simply adds layers to existing inequality.
None of this is occurring in isolation. The world in which Cuba is negotiating its opening is one where neo-fascism is becoming institutionalised through elected governments, racism is again state policy and extreme inequality is celebrated as a merit. Cuba is part of this landscape, not its centre. Neither is its socialism the redeeming exception it is sometimes portrayed as, nor could its eventual recolonisation be considered separately to what is occurring to much of Latin America.
The reforms are long overdue. The window of opportunity that Cuban socialism enjoyed after 1959 was squandered through procrastination, stagnation and persecution of all independent organisations. [The crackdown on protests on] July 11, 2021, confirmed that many Cubans see the revolution’s social contract as broken. Society reached this point disempowered, without its own political organisation and unable to endure more hardship.
The suffocating situation is reflected in other figures: infant mortality rose from 4.0 to 9.9 per thousand live births between 2018–25; childhood cancer survival rates fell from 85% to 65% due to a lack of cytostatic drugs; more than 12,000 children are awaiting surgery without supplies; and more than half of essential medicines are in short supply. This suffering, with its own history and exacerbated by Washington’s “maximum pressure”, is the raw material with which more than one scenario is being negotiated — pain turned into a geopolitical bargaining chip.
These scenarios may be hypothetical. But the crisis’ tragedy, its exploitation for self-interest and the Cuban people’s inability to influence its outcome are not.
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