The article below first appeared on jacobinlat.com, a Spanish-language magazine published by the Jacobin Foundation and based in Argentina.

The author, Wilder Pérez Varona, has served as managing director of the Institute of Philosophy of Cuba — the country’s primary state institution dedicated exclusively to research and teaching in the field of philosophy. The institute is located in Havana and functions as a branch of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment. Pérez Varona is currently doing post-doctoral research in Argentina.

The institute has a publishing arm, El Colectivo (The Collective), which Pérez Varona helps coordinate. It publishes books on socialism in Cuba, Marxism, and on leftist movements in Latin America and elsewhere. The introduction to their latest book, Cuba: Contradictions, Integrations and Consensus, is summarized as follows in El Colectivo’s Instagram page:

“Cuba does not surrender. Neither is it romanticized. It is thought about, debated, and transformed. Can Cuban socialism be renewed without abandoning its emancipatory horizon amid a blockade and global crisis? What real tensions are being experienced by labor, popular participation, and the social fabric in Cuba today? How can revolutionary consensus be rebuilt when inequalities are growing, migration is advancing, and bureaucracy is holding [things] back? A team of researchers at the Institute of Philosophy of Cuba responds to these questions with rigor, commitment, and decades of work together with communities and the popular social movement.”

As other Cuban revolutionaries have done, Pérez Varona highlights in the article below the central role of the escalating US economic war in causing the crisis that has engulfed the Caribbean country — the most severe economic and social crisis Cuba has faced since the 1959 revolution.

At the same time, he sounds the alarm that the new economic measures the Cuban government adopted in June could lead to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and undermine the main achievements of the Cuban Revolution — unparalleled social equality and human solidarity created and sustained for decades.

“The question is not how much of an opening to the [capitalist] market is contained in the 176 measures, but who will be able to decide — when that market grows — what Cuba produces and who benefits in the first place from that production,” Pérez Varona writes near the beginning of his article.

Put another way, the survival of the Cuban Revolution today depends to a large extent on the revolutionary caliber of its leadership.

This is reminiscent of a point Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin made about the consequences of the New Economic Policy (NEP) implemented in Russia in the early 1920s.

“The whole question is who will take the lead,” Lenin said in a report to the Second All-Russia Congress of Political Education Departments of Russia’s Communist Party, on October 17, 1921. “We must face this issue squarely — who will come out on top? Either the capitalists succeed in organizing first — in which case they will drive out the Communists and that will be the end of it. Or the proletarian state power, with the support of the peasantry, will prove capable of keeping a proper rein on those gentlemen, the capitalists, so as to direct capitalism along state channels and to create a capitalism that will be subordinate to the state and serve the state.”

In a recent article, World-Outlook explained that the introduction of the NEP “was a response to the devastation of the young Soviet republic after three years of civil war, foreign imperialist intervention, and setbacks of revolutionary struggles in Europe.” It also noted that “while some of the measures being taken in Cuba resemble the NEP, the situation facing Cuba today is very different.”

As World-Outlook pointed out in a Postscript to that article, in many ways there is more to contrast than compare in the situation Cuba faces today, as opposed to that of the young Soviet republic in the early 1920s.

In his report cited above, Lenin made a point that poses this distinction sharply. “What has the [proletarian state power] to rely on economically?” Lenin asked. “On the one hand, the improved position of the people.”

The position of the Cuban people today, however, is — as we are all painfully aware — not relatively improved. In fact, it is deteriorating under Washington’s oil blockade and other war-like measures. The Postscript also outlined other meaningful differences.

The living conditions of the Cuban people were hard hit by the 2019 escalation of the US blockade, when Trump issued more than 200 new sanctions during his first term as president; the 2020-22 pandemic that disrupted the economy and the country’s healthcare system; and the 2021 currency reorganization that was a de facto devaluation of the Cuban peso with accompanying steep inflation, affecting Cuban workers the most. The oil blockade this year has caused a near-paralysis of an already weakened economy and all that implies for the Cuban people’s daily lives and social safety net.

The article that follows reflects a real debate going on in Cuba around how to confront the tremendous challenges in everyday life wrought by the attempted imperialist strangulation and about how various ways of implementing the recent economic measures pose potential dangers to the Revolution. This is a debate that is hard to detect in the country’s official media.

We are publishing the article below for the information of our readers. The headline and text that follow are from the original. Notes, photos, and the translation from the Spanish-language original are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

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The 176 Measures: What Won’t Be Decided by the Market for Cuba

By Wilder Pérez Varona

The economic reforms promoted by the Cuban government respond to a crisis aggravated by the U.S. blockade, but they could profoundly change relations of power and open the way to new forms of concentration of wealth.

In face of the 176 measures approved by the Cuban government in June 2026, a good part of public debate around them centers on a false dilemma.

Either the package is accepted as an opening to the market made inevitable by the crisis, or it is denounced as an abandonment of principles that would be equal to an undeclared end to the process begun in 1959.

Both interpretations, politically opposed, share a fundamental error: they assume that what is decisive about this reform is the degree of market relations introduced and not the relationship of forces during that market transition.

The question is not how much of an opening to the [capitalist] market is contained in the 176 measures, but who will be able to decide — when that market grows — what Cuba produces and who benefits in the first place from that production.   

The reform package provisions were approved as authorizations, not regulations. They establish what will now be permitted, but not how, with what limits, or under whose control, while the legislative schedule that should have made those determinations — 138 legal regulations, as officially stated — has just gotten off the ground.

That empty space is filling up more quickly than anticipated. In late July, the prime minister reported that 110 of the 121 changes planned for June and July had been approved.  

That speed does not mean that the regulations were approved by authorities other than those that created the package, because each regulation comes out of the same circuit — Political Bureau, the Party’s Central Committee, Council of Ministers, National Assembly — that designed the 176 measures.

The boundary between what continues to belong to the Cuban people, and what is now being managed as if it did not, depends less on how long it takes for the regulation to be approved and more on who writes it and implements it.

The blockade does not explain everything

It would be a politically costly error to deny the weight of the US siege on the design of this reform. With the Trump administration and its policy of “maximum pressure,” the blockade has taken the form of a commercial, financial, and legal war devastating for the Cuban people — with a choke-off of energy as the centerpiece.

On May 1, Trump signed Executive Order 14404, which expanded secondary sanctions against foreign companies that do business with prohibited individuals or entities, or that operate in Cuban economic sectors such as energy, defense, mining, or financial and security services.

That order accelerated the almost complete disconnection between Cuba and international commerce and finance channels.

It was followed by a mass exit of foreign investment and a freefall in tourism, the island’s main source of hard currency.

The case of Sherritt International, documented by [journalist Logan] McMillen,^[1] is the clearest example of the besieging of Cuba’s economic metabolism.

That Canadian company, which has jointly operated Moa’s nickel production for more than three decades, saw its access to the international banking system threatened, and had to shut down its supply of nickel and cobalt. Moreover, around the end of May, the Ontario Securities Commission issued a cease trade order on Sherritt shares.

The outcome was its forced sale, under liquidation terms, to a family fund belonging to oligarchical right-wing forces closely tied to Trump and the Republican Party. Peter Hancock, interim CEO of Sherritt, later acknowledged that the deal happened because someone with access to Washington managed to convince the State Department.  

This episode demonstrates that the blockade is no longer limited to preventing capital from entering Cuba or even causing it to leave; rather, it selects which capital may enter and under what conditions. It sets the stage for a new form of imperialist recolonization and plunder of sovereign resources, which uses the power of the international banking system and US regulatory machinery to force the transfer of strategic assets to subjects aligned with Washington.

Cuba is negotiating these reforms under coercion that no country should have to endure to get its economy back on its feet.

This does not mean to say that the blockade explains, in and of itself, the concrete shape of the reform. The deficiency exploited by Washington from the outside — the lack of a system of oversight capable of determining the conditions in which capital may enter, and to whom it is accountable — is the same shortcoming that allows, from the inside, the Cuban administrative elite to capture the surplus of any opening without anyone, formally, being able to accuse them of having violated any law.

GAESA,^[2] the military conglomerate to which different estimates attribute 40% to 70% of the country’s economy, does not necessarily lose its management capacity with this reform. Moreover, the package opens for it a way to convert that management into stock ownership, through a National Program for the Assessment and Certification of State Enterprise Assets (measure #14), which, without independent auditing or transparency about final beneficiaries, could end up transforming military managers and cadres into legal stockholders of what, until yesterday, they were administering in the name of the State.

With nuances, this happened during much of the post-Soviet transition. The removal and 2024 trial of the former minister of the economy Alejandro Gil^[3] was a symptom of that absence of counterweights.

As documented by a study of Cuba’s social potential for conflict, an increase in scattered protests — pot-banging, specific demonstrations, criticisms by citizens in social media, complaints that do not end up in a sustained cycle of mobilization — has not yet translated into a crisis of governability. The State administers that discontent through restrictive regulation, surveillance, and selective repression. That capacity for containment is not a fact alien to the reform.

The blockade, limited democratization and effective containment of discontent are not rival explanations for what is happening to Cuba. They are mutually required to produce the results that we observe today.

The more urgent it becomes to find emergency solutions to the effects of the blockade, the smaller the margin to do so through citizen participation; the smaller that margin, the greater the discretionary power for managing the emergency of whoever was doing so before it began. And the more effective it is to contain discontent produced by the crisis, the smaller the political cost to continue exercising that discretionary power.

A new bourgeoisie and an old question about surplus

That pattern of capture is not limited to military leaders. The package [of reforms] will allow a private business to employ more than 100 workers, a single person to be the owner of a more than one business, and that same person to be a stockholder in several of them (measures #20, #21, and #23).

Those provisions lay the legal foundations for an accumulation of capital in Cuba without precedent since 1959, although neither the time periods nor criteria for that opening have been regulated. Nothing defines where those new businesspeople will come from, whether it is productive work or innovation or the conversion of existing administrative privileges into private property titles.

Meanwhile, what up until a few years ago we could call the state working class [workers employed by the state] is now being fragmented into trajectories that are increasingly different from each other.

Salaries are no longer set by a national standard; instead, they are tied to the economic/financial health of each enterprise, negotiated — according to the text — with labor union participation (measure #19). That participation is formal and it is not equal to autonomous participation. The difference is felt where it has the most weight, because the same reform that ties salaries to enterprise solvency dictates, in another measure, that enterprises that do not survive the planned currency devaluation will be liquidated.  

In parallel, subsidies will no longer go to products, but to people. The virtually extinct ration book, conceived as being available for all, will be replaced by an [online] platform, Soberanía [Sovereignty], which classifies as vulnerable those who receive assistance and leaves out the rest (measures #63 and #70).

The government itself reported, a little over a month after passing the reform package, that the classification process had identified more than 867,000 people in that category. The replacement of universal subsidies with focused subsidies changes the status of equality. It is no longer seen as a universal right and now will be administered as a condition subject to verification, subject to registration, and the burden of proof lies with the claimant.

This inequality, moreover, has its territory, color, and gender, even though none of the 176 measures name [such differentiation].

The capital in a position to take advantage of the new real estate opening and the foreign currency accounts will come, disproportionately, from a diaspora that is historically white, with networks and cultural capital that the expanded market will do nothing but reward.

A municipality lacking an industrial base or tourist attraction will not gain autonomy with the decentralization offered by the package; instead, it will inherit the deficiency that previously was poorly administered at a central level. And unpaid caregiver work, which sustains a large part of the social reproduction no longer guaranteed by the State, continues not to be included in the equation of who can start a business and who can’t.

The word that does all the work

In the core idea dedicated to property relations, the text acknowledges the legitimate growth of financial patrimony of individuals and legal entities, and it promises to prevent the exploitation of man by man.

What it rejects, literally, is “indiscriminate” exploitation (measure #36). Discriminate, administered exploitation remains within what is permitted, by omission.

The question of what people need to live is no longer the starting point of economic strategy, and national wealth is no longer conceived as a means for sustaining life.

The significance of that reversal is revealed not so much in what the text requires of the new business class, but in what the State exempts itself from guaranteeing.

Measure #64 obliges all economic actors — state and private, national and foreign — to participate, in the name of social responsibility, in a list of 13 functions that until now belonged unquestionably to the State: Helping to pay pensions, sustaining community dining halls, taking partial responsibility for orphanages and homes for the elderly, supporting hospitals and schools, and even covering the funeral costs of families who cannot afford them.

Universal social protection, for decades one of the principal arguments for the State’s legitimacy, now will depend on a third party deciding to take responsibility, without enforceable obligation, for something that was under the State’s competence.   

Even the instrument intended to mitigate the social cost of the adjustment reproduces the same structure. The [reform] package creates a Social Protection Fund as a “prerequisite for the changes” (measure #71), infusing capital in it with the savings that will come from eliminating subsidies for goods and services. That elimination is one of the transformations that the fund is supposed to precede. The [social safety] net is financed only after the withdrawal of what it is supposed to compensate for.  

The dispute over sovereignty

These deficiencies reveal that behind the agreement over the exhaustion of [Cuba’s] model, incompatible concepts are squaring off about who should hold the power, control the surplus, and define sovereignty.

Cuban public debate makes it possible to identify at least three possible projects for leaving behind planned centralization.

One is what the government approved, which separates property from management, opens stockholdings without touching social property, and decides with the same apparatus that always made the decisions.

Another proposes an effective socialization of power that subordinates all forms of management — state or private — to the binding control of workers and organized communities.

The third puts forward a transition to a “social economy of the market” under “democratic rule of law,” with legal security and political pluralism as a condition of economic reform.

All three share a diagnosis and correct recognition of the market as a mechanism of allocation; none coincides with the others on the architecture of power that should exercise control.

The first has the State apparatus to execute it; the second circulates above all as a criticism and normative horizon among socialist militants — such as the document drafted by members of the online platform “Punto y Aparte” —  without an institutional vehicle that would allow it to influence State policy; and the third has a concrete technical document, well-known spokespeople, and a channel for dialogue with the capital of the diaspora and terms for negotiation that Washington seems willing to accept.

The fact that the radical socialist position is today the weakest in terms of real power does not make it less appropriate; it motivates the question of why the realm of what is possible is so unequally distributed among the three proposals.

The same dispute reappears, with different vocabulary, in the conceptualization of sovereignty that the three positions defend.

Official discourse defines it as the political leadership’s ability to adopt instruments of the market without ceding control of the system — Prime Minister [Manuel] Marrero presented the [reform] package to parliament under the principle of “doing what is necessary to preserve the essential.”

It is sovereignty understood as adaptation, in which the market is allowed because it preserves the political system, not because it transforms it.

For the liberal [pro-capitalist] route, sovereignty resides in the citizenry and is exercised through elected institutions and subject to accountability; hence, it does not see a contradiction between demanding national independence and negotiating with international financial agencies or with Washington, and at the same time, it conceives of the diaspora as a “strategic asset.”

For the socialist position, sovereignty is not limited to the State retaining ownership or the existence of elections if those who produce the wealth do not make decisions about it; without that direct control, social property is, in fact, a title in name only.

All three invoke the same concept to legitimize architectures of power that are incompatible with each other, and the decisive question becomes how each defines sovereignty and who benefits from that definition.

The dispute around GAESA condenses that conflict.

The official package does not mention it because, by preserving intact the economic nucleus of political power, it treats its continuity as a condition of the reform.

The liberal project proposes to split it up and transfer its assets to the public budget and to civil institutions subordinated to a civil technocracy that is subject, at least on paper, to state supervision; the socialist alternative would subordinate it, like any other form of economic management, to the control of workers and communities.

The crux of the matter is whether Cuban sovereignty will permit an economic center of power removed from any type of accountability.

All three positions respond, respectively, to preserving it, breaking it up, or subordinating it.

What the reform leaves out

What was left out of the 176 measures says as much as what they contain.

There is no mention of the word co-management or self-management, or any mechanism through which the workers at an enterprise converted into a company with shareholders will have a voice or vote in electing their managers or on the destiny of their profits.

The text [of the reforms] talks about social property and designs, in practice, market-oriented management. It also does not contain networks of cooperative banks or funds for municipal development capable of capturing remittances and reinvesting them in the local area — such as Mok León^[4] proposes — instead of channeling them into the private accumulation of a few.

They are intermediate formulas between rigid state control over everything and the plain and simple privatization that other Latin American experiences dared to put into practice, with unequal but real results.  

There is also the lack of a sequence recommended by all the compared experiences regarding adjustments of this type, and which this package does not respect: first you stabilize, then you free up.

Eliminating universal subsidies before the Social Protection Fund is funded and operational reverses that order and leaves the most vulnerable layers exposed just when they most need the [social safety] net that is being taken away from them.

Lastly, comparative realism is missing.

The reform’s horizon — regulated market, a State that retains the “strategic” growth before redistribution — refers without saying so to the Chinese “reform and opening” of 1978 or the Vietnamese Doi Moi of 1986.^[5]

The analogy is broken on almost every point that made it work over there. China and Vietnam opened their economies with a young and majority rural population, with abundant and cheap labor, and they used the market to expand a preexisting agricultural and industrial base.

Cuba is attempting to stabilize itself through the market after having suffered the collapse of that base. More than a quarter of its population is now over the age of 60, and its population has fallen from 11.2 million to 9.4 million in less than a decade, above all due to migration.

Moreover, China and Vietnam opened during the ascending stage of globalization, while Cuba is doing so under external coercion that has already demonstrated its punitive reach. And where the Asian countries started their change with states capable of sustaining a gradual transition, the Cuban one lacks credibility, eroded by previous uneven and reversible reforms.

None of the above should be interpreted as an argument in favor of Cuba giving up on reforms, or as a concession to those who, from the outside, have been waiting for 60 years for the country to fail to be able to say they were right.

The same State Department, which designed the sanctions that preceded this reform, published, on July 20, a report that redefines the conflict with Cuba as a civilizing crusade against “left-wing terrorism”^[6] first, before a dispute over economic policy or sovereignty.

This degree of viciousness would make any position on the left suspicious if it is not reduced to denouncing the blockade, as if examining this reform with a critical eye was the equivalent of doing Washington a favor.

Demanding the end of the imperialist strangulation, and demanding — at the same time — that those resisting are held accountable about who concretely benefits from the way that resistance is designed, are part of the same responsibility.

Wilder Pérez Varona, who holds a doctorate in philosophy and is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of Cuba, writes about the history of Marxist and socialist thought. He is a coordinator of the El Colectivo (The Collective) publishing house.

NOTES

[1] See The Imperial Plunder of Cuba Has Begun by Logan McMillen, published by Jacobin on June 17, 2026.

[2] GAESA (the Spanish-language acronym of Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., or Business Administration Group) is a major business association in Cuba owned and operated by the country’s Revolutionary Armed Forces. It controls an estimated 40% to 70% of the Cuban economy, managing the most important sectors that generate foreign currency, such as tourism, hotels, gas stations, supermarkets, and major financial institutions.

[3] Alejandro Gil was Cuba’s former economy minister from 2018 to 2024. He was fired in February 2024 and was subsequently tried and convicted in December 2025 to life in prison. In a statement, Cuba’s Supreme People’s Court said that the former official “deceived the country’s leadership and the people he represented, thereby causing damage to the economy.”

Gil “breached work processes with classified official information that he handled, stole, damaged, and finally made available to enemy services,” the court concluded. “This highly damaging behavior demonstrated an ethical, moral, and political degradation in the accused that makes him deserve a severe criminal response, as required by Article 4 of the Constitution of the Republic, which establishes that treason against the homeland is the most serious of crimes and that those who commit it are subject to the most severe penalties.”

Gil had been accused of a dozen crimes, including espionage, “corrupt and deceitful actions,” using his “authority” for personal gain, receiving money from foreign sources, and bribing other public officials “to legalize the acquisition of [state] assets.”

Prior to his dismissal, Gil had led the Reordering Task enacted during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Reordering Task was an economic overhaul aimed at retiring the Convertible Cuban Peso (CUC), among other goals. The CUC was one of Cuba’s two official currencies used from 1994 until it was phased out on January 1, 2021. Pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, the CUC was used as a substitute for foreign currency, and for years, Cuban working people exchanged their pesos for CUC to buy a range of food items and consumer goods in state-run “CUC stores,” as well as for goods and services in the tourism and foreign business sector. These stores were known officially as “hard currency collection stores” (tiendas de recaudación de divisas in Spanish).

The Reordering Task is widely seen in Cuba as a failure, leaving the country in worse economic shape after its implementation.

[4] Liu Mok León is a prominent Cuban economist. He has served as a researcher in Cuba’s National Institute of Economic Research (Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Económicas (INIE)). In his analysis of the 176 economic measures recently adopted by the Cuban government, León has warned that rapidly converting state assets into private holdings risks concentrating wealth into the hands of a minority. Instead of outright privatization, Mok León argues that state-owned companies should be democratically managed by their own workers. He believes employees should have a direct say in production priorities, investment plans, and profit sharing.

[5] Doi Moi (literally translated as “Restoration”) was the name of the economic reforms enacted in Vietnam in the mid-1980s. Such reforms launched in China in 1978, and in Vietnam in 1986, led to large-scale privatization of industry and most of the means of production and exchange, as well as abolition of the state monopoly of foreign trade, before the turn of the century.

In the view of the editors of World-Outlook, the totality of these reforms and the way they were implemented amounted to the re-establishment of capitalism in both of these former workers’ states. How this process unfolded, and the exact nature and functioning of capitalism in these countries today, go way beyond what could be explained in a footnote. It is also important to note that this view is not necessarily shared by the author of the article above. For those wishing to study the evolution of this transformation in China we recommend The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform.

[6] For more information see Rubio’s Anti-Cuba Diatribe: A McCarthyite Assault on Democratic Rights.

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