HAVANA — Analysts on Friday described Cuba’s newly approved free-market reforms as the most far-reaching changes to the island’s communist economy since the 1959 revolution, as a grandson of former President Raúl Castro said in an interview that the country must find a way to move its economy forward.
The package of 176 measures is designed to further loosen the grip of the state over Cuba’s economy, which has been severely strained by tighter U.S. sanctions under President Donald Trump. Under the current system, the government largely controls what is produced, who produces it, the prices of goods and how national resources are distributed.
Among the changes are broader opportunities for private enterprise, the ability to import and export without going through state intermediaries, freedom to hire workers directly, authorization for private banks and the possibility of investment from Cubans living abroad. The plan also opens the door for fast-food chains to operate on the island.
“Elements that for decades were considered pillars of the revolutionary economy, such as the state monopoly on foreign trade and the centralization of productive forces, have been dismantled,” said Luis Carlos Battista, a Cuban American political scientist and lawyer pursuing a doctorate at the University of Salamanca.
Cuban officials, including former President Raúl Castro, who continues to hold considerable influence, have previously attempted more limited economic reforms, but those efforts often stalled amid bureaucratic resistance. In approving the latest measures, authorities warned that implementation may be gradual and said some steps may prove difficult without an end to U.S. energy and financial restrictions.
Since January, Cuba has faced a severe U.S. energy and financial embargo that has sharply limited access to fuel, the country’s main energy source, worsening a crisis that had already been deepening over the past five years. Power outages have stretched to as long as 20 hours a day, disrupting health care, transportation and education across the island.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that they are maintaining a policy of maximum pressure to change the island’s political and economic system, which has endured for six decades despite U.S. pressure. They have not ruled out the use of military force.
Castro grandson says Cuba not even ‘slightly’ a threat to U.S.
In an i nterview published Friday, in the United Arab Emirates-based The National, Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, grandson of the revolutionary leader, reiterated that Cuba “doesn’t even slightly represent a threat” to the U.S.
Rodriguez Castro said in the video interview that Cuba’s government was seeking a “very Cuban” economic model.
“Our country must seek a path to economic development where we must inevitably diversify our economy, diversify the way we do business and diversify the way we do investments,” he said.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that the proposed measures were based on an analysis of the Vietnamese and Chinese models, communist countries with market economies.
What is likely to pose a significant barrier are U.S. sanctions on Cuba, said Lee Schlenker, a research associate at the Quincy Institute in Washington.
“With these new measures, along with others that are likely on the table, they will only have a true effect if complemented with the gradual lifting of U.S. prohibitions and sanctions more broadly,” he said.
Without sanctions being lifted, Schlenker and other analysts said many of the presented measures will be inapplicable, especially due to the limitations and prohibitions imposed on potential investors, who are penalized in the U.S. financial system if they do business with Cuba.
Beyond that, there are a number of other obstacles that could stymie significant reforms, ranging from mistrust from potential investors to what Battista, the Cuban-American analyst called “slow and inefficient” bureaucracy.
Despite these obstacles, the Cuban government faces a short window for obtaining results, said Paolo Spadoni, associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University in Georgia.
“If Cuban leaders hope to survive this unprecedented crisis and the pressure from the United States, they must move quickly with the implementation of reform and the achievement of tangible results,” Spadoni said.
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