Cuban economy needs ‘urgent changes’ as US blockade deepens crisis, says president

Cuba’s economy needs “urgent changes” to overcome a major crisis intensified by a US oil blockade, president Miguel Díaz-Canel said in a speech to Communist party leaders.

“The situation calls for urgent and necessary changes,” Díaz-Canel told the party’s politburo in his frankest admission yet of the need to overhaul the country’s communist model.

In the remarks, broadcast on Thursday, he cited China and Vietnam as possible models for opening Cuba’s economy to the world in order to “create economic wealth and distribute it equally.”

Díaz-Canel made the remarks at a meeting called to fast-track reforms aimed at boosting the growing private sectoras the island, under pressure from Washington, undergoes a major economic crisis.

Some of the reforms “will not have absolute consensus but cannot be postponed,” Díaz-Canel stressed.

“When people’s lives become this hard,” the Communist party and government had a responsibility to “change what needs to be changed” rather than try to explain away the crisis, he said.

The oil blockade imposed by president Donald Trump in January has brought Cuba’s already moribund economy to the brink of collapse, marked by power cuts sometimes lasting more than 30 hours and shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.

While Havana’s position had been to blame its woes on a more-than-six-decade US trade embargo and the blockade, Díaz-Canel acknowledged there were “obstacles that don’t come from outside, nor the blockade.”

He pointed to “slowness, bureaucracy and norms that impede those who want to produce” as well as “decisions that we have put off.”

The reforms, widely seen as a desperate, 11th hour bid to stave off economic collapse, have won the backing of influential former president Raul Castro.

Castro, who was recently indicted by the US over the downing of two civilian planes three decades ago, backed the proposals as being “the most beneficial to the revolution at this time.”

But it is unclear whether the reforms would satisfy Trump, who is pushing for a change in Cuba’s economic model, if not its leaders.

“I welcome any change that helps revive the dying patient,” the owner of a small private supermarket in Havana, who declined to be identified, told AFP in a not-so-cryptic reference to Cuba’s economy.