In memory of Fred Jameson (1934-2024) and Yahya Sinwar (1962-2024)

Last June, Cosmonaut published an article in which I argued that the defense of the Cuban Revolution was a position all socialists should agree on. In that article, I tried to present Cuban Marxism from a non-sectarian position, highlighting its openness throughout the nearly seven decades in power.^[1] Just days later, the Cuban government announced a program of 176 comprehensive measures that were, to most observers, hard to fit within a supposedly socialist framework. Regardless, I still stand by the arguments I put forward in that article. In this article, which also serves as a follow-up to my previous one, I will try to explain how we can navigate this apparent contradiction. Here I will detail a perspective on how to understand the Cuban reforms from a Marxist point of view and, by comparing them with other socialist experiences of reform, try to elucidate how we can think about this kind of policy change under Communist-led governments. My endeavor here is to understand economic reform historically, rather than address this question abstractly, while highlighting Cuba’s commitment to Marxism as a method for navigating reality rather than as an invariable dogma.

Historicizing Communism, Historicizing Marxism

Historian Odd Arne Westad, one of the foremost scholars of the Cold War and someone who is definitely not a Marxist, has made a valuable point about the opening of the Soviet archives during the last three decades. When writing about Soviet foreign policy before visiting the Soviet archives before 1991, Westad “shared the view that ideology was a tool of limited relevance in helping us understand Soviet policy.”^[2] However, throughout his work, Westad has highlighted that the biggest surprise after the opening of the archives was that there was no big surprise after all: to everyone’s shock, the Soviet leadership believed in Communism and Marxism! Those who have done work in archives in Communist-led countries — a group that I belong to — can tell you that there is no big conspiracy and that, in order to understand socialist policy, one has to take ideology seriously.

This is, obviously, not the most common path for historians. When reading about countries like Cuba, it is not hard to find accounts of revolutionary measures like nationalizations or voluntary labor presented as the product of a de-politicized authoritarianism: there is no ideology behind them, just the government’s desire for control and domination.^[3] This is, most of the time, either because it is the product of Cold-Warrior-ism, a position in the ideological war against socialism, or due to a sheer inability to imagine people believing wholeheartedly that the exploitation of man by man must end — or both. Any Marxist argument must reject these positions and try to understand the historical specificity and context of all of these policies.

If we look at the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP), Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and the Cuban reforms of the 21st century, the context is obvious: an existential crisis for the revolutionary state. In the Soviet Union, it was both the civil war (and imperialist foreign invasion) and the consequent collapse of the Soviet economy; in the People’s Republic of China, it was ten years of civil war and disruption of the economy under the banner of the Cultural Revolution; and in Cuba, the decades-long comprehensive blockade of the island unilaterally implemented by the United States, the effects of which reached new levels after the fall of the Socialist Bloc and, also, after Trump strengthened it with more than 200 new clauses during the COVID-19 pandemic, which at the same time devastated Cuba’s tourism-based economy. To make things worse, the other side of the coin was an undeniable situation of economic underdevelopment and lack of industry vis-à-vis the core of the capitalist world, which was leading the charge against them (the last years of Mao’s China were famously an exception, at least in terms of foreign policy).

Any analysis of this kind of revolutionary retreat, regardless of whether one agrees with their suitability or not, must start from the idea that, in many ways, the dichotomy is between reform and the demise of the revolutionary state. In this sense, they were historically contingent. This is, again, a historical point. As a point on method, on the other hand, it also has to be stated that the Marxist position has always been the analysis of specific conditions rather than transhistorical statements. As Marx wrote, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”^[4] The work of both historians and Marxists is to elucidate what these circumstances are. Because, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, the “absolute […] imperative of all dialectical thought’ is to ‘always historicise!”^[5] In this sense, this is not just a historical point, but also a political insight through which we can start to understand the inevitable meanders of any revolutionary state and to be healthily skeptical about ahistorical dogmatism. Marx warned us about the dangers of writing recipes "for the cook-shops of the future"^[6]; if he had lived to see the 20th century, he probably would have been uneasy about writing recipes for the past too.

Bukharin as a Symptom

In order to understand the Cuban case, the entangled histories of the NEP and Nikolai Bukharin form a useful comparison. Implemented in 1921, towards the end of the Russian Civil War, historian Moshe Lewin summarised it as a deal between the Soviet government and the peasantry: Lenin “was allowing the peasants a strong dose of capitalism in exchange for 'the rest,' that is, in exchange for leaving political power in the hands of the Bolsheviks.”^[7] Furthermore, Lewin also linked it to the Soviet Union as an underdeveloped country: “he thought that Russia needed a long period of capitalist development in order to assimilate organizational methods and technical expertise, and to acquire the capital and the intellectual abilities that the Workers' State did not yet possess.”^[8] In this sense, both the elements of the existential danger for the Soviet state and underdevelopment were present.

Certain understandings of Soviet politicians linked to the NEP have taken a toll on the history of the Communist movement, most notably leading Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin. If someone only knew about Bukharin from what his only available biography (written by Stephen F. Cohen^[9]) said about him, he would appear like a social democrat, ‘the good Bolshevik’ in the eyes of an anti-Communist. He was probably the staunchest defender of the NEP, yes, but he nevertheless remained committed to Marxism and to socialist transformation. Bukharin started on the left of the Bolshevik party, opposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk because he argued for a continuation of the war, but as a revolutionary war against the European bourgeoisie, and writing The Economics of the Transition Period in 1920^[10], one of the central interventions on the topic in the early Soviet Union and one of the most important elaborations of the positions of the Bolshevik left, staunchly opposed to market mechanisms. What happened, then? Did Bukharin, as Cohen and other non-Marxists and even some Marxists believe, fall from his horse on his way to Damascus? Michael Charles Howard and John Edward King provide a persuasive counterpoint that highlights Bukharin’s method:

Bukharin's NEP model did not, however, represent a complete break with the Economics of the Transformation Period. Both rested upon an acceptance of Bolshevik vanguardism during the transition; each was defended on the same interpretation of historical materialism, in which dialectics became virtually equivalent to the functionalist equilibrium perspective of modern sociology; and many of the substantive arguments which Bukharin had made in 1920 found new expression in his revised thinking on transition. The long-term goal also remained unchanged: a fully socialized economy, including agriculture, and the elimination of market relations. Bukharin was never a 'market socialist' in the modern sense. Thus he did not wholly repudiate his earlier scheme, arguing that in the circumstances it had represented the appropriate policy. The major difference, in Bukharin's view, was that circumstances had changed.^[11]

Probably the most astute analysis of Bukharin is that of Lars T. Lih in his What Was Bolshevism?, which roots this line of argument in a close re-reading of the polemics of the early Soviet Union. For Lih, “Bukharin’s NEP-era formula ‘overcoming the market through the market’ was not an expression of a sneaking admiration for pluralism and competition […]. And Bukharin indignantly rejected any insinuation that he himself saw NEP as a semi-permanent condition rather than as a transitional phase.”^[12] In this way, Bukharin embodies the contradictions of the early Soviet economy and the struggle for creating the first stable socialist state in world history. As Lewin argues, neither the NEP nor War Communism (the system established before the NEP) “have any connection with pre-Revolutionary preoccupations and theories”^[13] — socialist construction is an eminently practical task, and most of its problems only arise when faced with the specific circumstances from which it has to arise. Ultimately, Lenin himself, arguably the 20th-century Communist with the most overwhelming support within most strands of Marxism, was the one who proposed the NEP; still, no substantial part of the Marxist tradition condemns Lenin for a deviancy that would be unforgivable if it had been enacted by any other revolutionary. This is a consequence of still perceiving, in a metaphorical sense, the rails of socialist transition.

The Historical Limitations to Socialist Transition

Can a revolution go off the rails? To answer this, we first need to define what these rails are. The classic debate here is that of whether the People’s Republic of China is still socialist or not. Recently, Marxist geographer Theryn Arnold made a useful contribution to this debate in Cosmonaut, introducing the idea that the key to this debate is Marxist state theory.^[14] For Arnold, drawing on authors such as Bob Jessop and Bertell Ollman, “the SME [Socialist Market Economy] is […] neither a neutral instrument in socialist hands nor simply capitalist restoration. It is a specific contradictory configuration in which the socialist state-form and capitalist market relations are in structural tension.”^[15] But, as Arnold acknowledges, this is not an answer to the question of whether China is socialist or not, but a framework that can open the door to a sophisticated answer that is based on “an analysis of whether the structural pressures market relations introduced into the Chinese party-state are being progressively constrained by expanding socialist institutional capacities, or whether the logic of capital accumulation is progressively subsuming the party-state's own reproduction.”^[16]That is, even regarding a small country such as Cuba, an ambitious endeavor that a single article cannot answer comprehensively.

If we cannot answer the question directly, what can we do? Ironically, what we can do is complicate the question further, and explore two main dialectics: the dialectic between what is necessary and what is desirable, and the dialectic between modes of production. Lenin put it beautifully: "this transition period has to be a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism — or, in other words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very feeble."^[17] This is, ultimately, a question of what is inside and what is outside of the socialist system, a story of two totalities fighting to subsume each other.

There is yet another historical limitation that needs to be taken into account: the national dimension of these dialectics and of socialist transition in general. In a refreshing recent article published in Spanish, the Communist militant and author known as Volodia offered a critical assessment of the history of the prospects of world revolution and how their demise led to Stalin’s model — and, at the same time, how Stalin’s policy systematically hindered those prospects too. Lenin’s idea of accepting the possibility of the collapse of the Soviet regime in the name of the fight for world revolution was discarded in the debates after his death and, in Volodia’s words, “the isolation of the revolution stopped being a limitation to become a positive programme.”^[18] The classical Marxist solution to the problem of underdevelopment under socialism had been summarised by Lenin: “with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage”.^[19] With this hope killed, Communist-led states only had a path of accumulation and developmentalism that implied theoretical and practical concessions. This is not meant as an ahistorical condemnation of really existing socialism as tainted by an original sin, but a historicizing effort of the Soviet debates — in which, as Volodia argues, both sides accepted that building socialism in one country was possible — and to understand what the playing cards have been for Marxist revolutionaries since the 1920s.

Cuba in the Early 21st Century

And what have been Cuba’s playing cards in the 21st century? Arguably, the worst ones out of any Communist-led state. Any complete analysis of the Cuban Revolution in general, but especially in the 21stcentury, should always start from the decades-long, bipartisan effort by the United States to subjugate Cuba once again. Until the late 1980s, Cuba had the help of the Socialist Bloc and could benefit from the echoes of early Soviet hopes of developed socialist countries reversing unequal exchange and breaking the chains of underdevelopment in other regions. The impact that the 1989-1991 collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe had on Cuba is impossible to overstate; it is tempting to see it as isolated as the early Soviet Union, but with the crucial difference that one was a transcontinental mammoth and the other an island of a similar size to Iceland, 90 miles away from a state committed to defeat it.

As is well known, Cuba had long been a monocrop economy. In 1990, even after the deterioration of its trading relations with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, sugar still amounted to 80% of Cuba’s export earnings, which were paid by the Comecon at three times the world market price.^[20] The sugar industry, slowly becoming outdated in terms of machinery, could only remain at the center of the Cuban economy due to the stability and reassurance that the Socialist Bloc provided: it received nearly 80% of Cuba’s exports, while it supplied 85% of its imports and 80% of its investments. Its fall was obviously brutal for Cuba — between 1989 and 1993, Cuba’s GDP fell by almost 35%.^[21] The fall of the Socialist Bloc was soon followed by the Torricelli Act (1992) and the Helms-Burton Act (1996), both of which strengthened the unilateral US blockade of the island and were aimed at destabilizing the island.

Lenin’s dream of developed socialist countries helping to overcome the underdevelopment of other socialist countries did not materialize in Cuba. Many arguments can be presented — and this is a complex question that deserves a much more elaborated answer — but it is hard to deny that a big part of this was Cuba’s position in the periphery of the socialist world and, if one wishes to take the argument further, the transformation of the Soviet Union from an instrument to strive for global revolution to what Volodia describes as "a bureaucratic apparatus that looked after its own interests."^[22] The international socialist division of labor had a clear center and roles to be ascribed to, and the abovementioned beneficial conditions did not offer incentives for diversification.

In those circumstances, market reforms already started in Cuba in the 1990-1994 period, which included the legalization of the dollar, an opening up to foreign investment and tourism, and stretching the window for self-employment.^[23] Cuba was forced to change its entire economic structure. Within a decade, sugar fell from 80% of all exports to 26.7%, with mining, tobacco and services replacing sugar’s centrality — services, mainly tourism and health care, rose from 10% of total exports in 1990 to 70% in 2005.^[24] Leading Cuban economist José Luis Rodríguez summarised the effects and goals of these first reforms: “these emergency measures had their intended effects: to avoid malnutrition; to maintain important socioeconomic services such as health care and education; and beyond that, to prevent any further reduction in the population’s standard of living.”^[25] In 1995, Fidel Castro himself explained to his population what these reforms were about:

We cannot guide ourselves by the criteria of what we like or don’t like, but rather of what is useful or not useful for the nation and our people in such decisive moments for the history of our country. […] We have stated that we are introducing capitalist elements in our system, in our economy, that is real; we have even spoken of the consequences that we appreciate from the use of those mechanisms.^[26]

Throughout these reforms, the leadership stressed that their commitment to socialism remained, whereas — as Bukharin had argued decades earlier — the circumstances had changed. For the Revolution, Cuba’s situation did not invalidate their convictions. Cuba faced the same problem the Bolsheviks did, but as an infinitely smaller country dependent on imports and only 90 miles away from its main enemy.

This was not a matter of survival at all costs nor just for the sake of remaining in power. In such a dire situation, total government spending went from 68% to 90% of the GDP between 1990 and 1993, with spending on social security and welfare increasing by 29% between 1990 and 1994.^[27] Thanks to this, which included a vast investment in maintaining the ration book (libreta) to ensure a minimum caloric intake for everyone, the Cuban population could resist the crisis.

These reforms went hand in hand with a return to the popular political mobilization that characterized the 1960s. Turning to youth organizations to assess the actual situation of the population, Fidel Castro resurrected his long-held suspicion against bureaucratic deformations, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.^[28] This mobilization, mostly known by the name of the Battle of Ideas, was spearheaded by a generation of young Cubans who had felt neglected thus far and who were ‘emergently’ integrated through further education as the ‘shock troops’ of the new reinforced service sector.^[29]The Battle of Ideas ended with Fidel Castro’s retirement due to health issues in 2006, but the new government headed by Raúl Castro started a comprehensive participatory process in late 2007 that included national discussions based on the wide range of political and economic concerns held by the Cuban people.^[30]

The apparent contradiction between slowly increasing market reforms and this kind of mobilization is only a contradiction, again, if the Revolution is de-politicized. Fidel Castro was aware of what people who believed in the socialist project might say about these measures, and he pondered why the Revolution was still socialist regardless of the first — more moderate — reforms:

The key of it all, comrades and friends, the key of it all is power. Who has the power, landlords [latifundistas], the bourgeoisie, the rich? Here, of course, I speak of landlords because that’s what we had here; today we don’t have landlords, the only landlords here are the workers from the different cooperatives […], they are the only ones, and there are tens of thousands of independent small peasants who own their land. Who has power? Is power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, by the bourgeoisie and for the bourgeoisie? Is power in the hands of the capitalists, by the capitalists and for the capitalists? The question of power is key.^[31]

Political mobilizations and national participatory processes were the other side of the coin of market reforms. The Soviet experience had taught the Revolution about the dangers of a dictatorship of the proletariat turning into a bureaucratic apparatus, and Fidel Castro was determined not to let the widening window for capitalist relations sever the relationship between the leadership and the people.

One of the most clear-sighted historians of Cuba, Antoni Kapcia, structured his last history of the Cuban Revolution around different phases of public debate. "The statistics alone suggest that the idea of the Cuban system being monolithic, without debate or disagreement, is wide off the mark," Kapcia argues. While asking why the Revolution survived the fall of the Socialist Bloc, Kapcia continues:

In other words, of the Revolution’s sixty-one years of existence, only around twenty-seven years have seen little or no internal discussion, and, even then, discussion and disagreement were clearly continuing under the surface of an apparent consensus, certainty and consolidation. Clearly, debate, disagreement and discussion have not by any means been exceptions. Instead, they have always been at the heart of the process and, therefore, at the heart of any explanation of the political system’s (i.e. the Revolution’s) survival.^[32]

As Kapcia eloquently explains, these mechanisms of exchange between the masses and the institutions went beyond simple elections to a parliament and took many different forms: from mass organizations that went from the neighborhood level to the national level and workers’ parliaments in the workplace to open referenda and nation-wide participation processes. Far from being simply associated with the charismatic figure of Fidel Castro, these kinds of political mobilization were integrated within the political system itself and became an inherent part of the relationship between the Cuban people and their leadership. Contrary to many personalist narratives, Fidel Castro’s retirement meant little.

Raúl Castro’s Reforms

Raúl Castro had a legitimacy that no other Cuban leader had — not because of his surname, but because of his role first during the armed struggle as a guerrilla leader and then as the last remaining member of the original core leadership. Historically close to the Soviets and their model, Raúl Castro had already been one of the main figures in a period of economic reform; in the 1970s, he spearheaded the adoption of a Sovietised economic model that placed an emphasis on economic efficiency after the more ‘Guevarista’ period.^[33] Less charismatic than his brother, he was a pragmatist who was committed to breaking taboos.

Raúl Castro became president in 2008, and economic reform soon followed. In 2011, this comprehensive set of reforms was codified in the Lineamientos (guidelines). The Lineamientos defined the Cuban economic system as one “still based on the socialist property of all people over the fundamental means of production, in which the socialist distribution principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their work’ will prevail.”^[34] The economic policy of the Party was defined as being guided by “the principle that only socialism is able to overcome the difficulties and to preserve the conquests of the Revolution.” Socialism is defined as “equality of rights and opportunities for all citizens, not egalitarianism, and enshrines the principle that in the Cuban socialist society no one will be left helpless.”^[35] Finally, it maintains economic planning as “the main way of managing the national economy,” while also “taking the market into account, influencing it and considering its characteristics.”^[36] These guidelines would be updated for the 2016-2021 period, but the core would remain; by 2016, 21% of the 313 guidelines had already been fully implemented, and 77% were underway.^[37]

What remains of Marxism there? “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their work” is a proposition that Marx had argued against in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, in his long open discussion with socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle. For Marx, this would be “a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”^[38] In Marx’s terms, “the same amount of labour which he [the worker] has given to society in one form he receives back in another. Here obviously the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is the exchange of equal values.’” As an alternative, he famously coined the motto “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”^[39]

But this does not mean that the Cuban Revolution had embraced Lassalleanism. When Lenin argued about the existence of a "first phase of Communist society" in which bourgeois law has not yet been completely abolished, he proposed that "an equal amount of products for an equal amount of labour" would be a realized "socialist principle." For Lenin, “this is not yet communism […]. This is a ‘defect’, says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law.”^[40] In this sense, this is not a rejection of Marxist principles — it is an acknowledgment of the difficulties of socialist transition in purely Leninist terms.

This is, again, the delicate balance that Arnold discusses regarding China: how does the Cuban state interact with the determining influence of the market? Does the increasing power of the market hinder Fidel Castro’s answer to the question of power that he talked about and that Raúl Castro’s Lineamientos presented in typically republican terms as "equality of rights and opportunities for all citizens"? It is important to note that the Lineamientos stressed that ‘in non-state management, concentration of property’ in the hands of individuals would not be allowed;^[41] in the 2016 update, the phrase would be radicalized and became "the concentration of property and material and financial wealth."^[42] The Revolution was determined to set rigid rails to the market and the social relations it entailed. However, the Revolution is a dynamic totality, and these questions require a constant comparison of these first openings with what would come next and their respective social formations.

Reforms and their international dimension

The Revolution became internationally isolated in 1991, and it is isolated now again. Yet the first quarter of the 21st century has been a rollercoaster regarding Cuba’s international position. The fall of the Socialist Bloc and the strengthening of the blockade during the 1990s marked an era that ended with the establishment of close relations with Bolivarian Venezuela. During that period, US efforts against the Revolution were all but strengthened, from adding new clauses to the blockade to terrorist attacks financed by the Cuban diaspora in Florida. This is a complex and widely documented topic that would require a much longer treatment in order to honor the severity of this reality,^[43] but for the purposes of this article we will only note the bipartisan element of these genocidal efforts and that they have historically tended to intensify in moments of crisis in Cuba.

Both the close relations with Venezuela and other Pink Tide governments and the short-lived thaw with Obama’s United States revitalized the Cuban economy. Around the same time, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping visited Cuba in summer 2014, leading to important agreements to ease Cuban debt and regarding trade and credit with both Russia and China.^[44] Other countries would have used this situation, especially regarding Obama’s rapprochement, to deepen reforms and integration with their neighbors. Cuba did not. Why was that?

First of all, Obama did not represent a watershed for US policy regarding Cuba. The 2016 White House website was clear: “decades of U.S. isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our objective of empowering Cubans to build an open and democratic country.” For the Obama administration, the widening of the window of authorized sales and exports to Cuba would “seek to empower the nascent Cuban private sector and make it easier for Cuban citizens to have access to certain lower-priced goods to improve their living standards and gain greater economic independence from the state.”^[45] For the US government, there was a clear distinction between undermining the control of the Communist Party over both society and the Cuban economy and ‘empowering’ Cuban civil society. Raúl Castro’s government was obviously not oblivious to this open goal, but willingly engaged with this US policy because it was seen as a window of opportunity after decades of aggressive foreign policy. Because they were aware of this, the idea was to strengthen the rails for the Cuban markets and the primacy of planning and the leadership of the Communist Party over the economy.

Secondly, we should go back to the idea of ideological continuity and the commitment to socialist transition. Just like during the period of Sovietisation during the 70s and the first half of the 80s, the easing up of the limiting circumstances for the Cuban Revolution has historically not been used as an excuse to reform more, but as a source of oxygen to, at least, not have to back down even more from the widely unchanging principles of the Revolution. What might be seen as a missed opportunity, even for someone as pragmatic as Raúl Castro, should be understood through the filter of the Revolution’s ideology: reforms were retreats and retreats were only for losing situations.

New Generation, New Problems

When Miguel Díaz-Canel succeeded Raúl Castro in 2018, Cuba had its first leader born after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. Slowly, the generation that had gained strong legitimacy by fighting against Batista had nearly disappeared. However, neither the death of Fidel Castro in 2016 nor Raúl Castro’s full retirement in 2021 meant a substantial change in the trajectory that this article is presenting. Díaz-Canel’s communications have often carried a symptomatic motto: "we are Cuba, we are continuity."

The first big task for Díaz-Canel’s government was drafting a new constitution. After a long process of popular consultations, the constitutional draft was approved in a nationwide referendum with nearly 96% of valid votes in February 2019. The 2019 Constitution provided a new legal framework for the social relations brought about by the reforms, which had violated the previous constitution.^[46] The new constitution only codified the approach that had characterized the reforms so far: private property became one of the seven allowed kinds of property, but only with "a complementary role within the economy."^[47] The Cuban economy was defined as "a socialist economy based on the whole people’s property over the fundamental means of production and the main form of property," while economic planning "considers, regulates and controls the market according to the interests of society."^[48] Once again, no substantial change. In a 2024 interview with journalist Ignacio Ramonet, Díaz-Canel argued that the private sector would keep being expanded: “it is going to keep being part of our framework of economic actors, and it is going to be a sector that is not going to be an enemy of the Revolution; it is a sector that is going to contribute, because on top of that it is a sector that has been created under the conditions of the Revolution.”^[49] In this way, Díaz-Canel has continued to stress the primacy of state ownership and the leadership of the Communist Party, but also of the ultimate aim of constructing socialism.

The 2020-21 period represented a watershed for Cuba: the Trump administration strengthened the blockade with 243 new measures, the Covid-19 pandemic completely stopped the main engine of the Cuban economy — tourism — and a very delicate long-postponed currency reform. Inflation soared, and still does. Partly thanks to social media, the internal opposition has been able to organize small protests on the island for the first time in decades. An unprecedented wave of emigration unfolded; in 2024, the vice-president of the National Bureau of Statistics and Information declared in front of the Cuban parliament that the country’s population had decreased by one million between 2023 and 2021, falling below 10 million.^[50] To tackle these deep-seated problems, new reforms were prepared.

The 2026 Cuban Reforms

In June 2026, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz presented a series of 176 new measures of a depth that arguably only had the 2011 Lineamientos as a precedent. After all this discussion about reform under socialism in general and in Cuba, the main questions are now which parts of these reforms are qualitatively new and which are simply a continuation of previous reforms.

Some of the main leitmotifs of the reforms are familiar already. The theme of efficiency, for example, when it is established that state assets that sustain losses can be liquidated and restructured (measure 16), can be felt throughout most of the measures. On this note, the long-standing effort to decentralize both political and economic decision-making — which is not only a matter of efficiency but also a way to circumvent the blockade — is also present, to the point that words such as ‘liberalisation’ are not present among the measures and are often replaced by the word ‘de-centralise’ (featured up to 10 times). This is not a linguistic trick but a symptom of the reasoning behind these measures. Finally, another aspect that is consistent with previous measures is an increase in the number of sectors in which private businesses can operate, without specifying which (measure 27).

Regardless of these important continuities, the new aspects of the reforms are far more significant. One central element of these reforms is a new distinction between management (gestión) and ownership (propiedad). Measure 32 is clear: ‘To ratify the social property over the fundamental means of production and progressing towards to non-state management over those means.’ As we have seen, maintaining the socialization of the ‘fundamental means of production’ has been a constant feature of Cuban reform, which implies the state monopoly over certain sectors of the economy. However, what the new reforms allow is a qualitative leap in the process of decentralization: individuals and companies will be able to buy shares from state enterprises and, significantly, this applies to both nationals and foreigners (measure 33). This also includes the purchase of properties on the island (measure 34) and fostering investment in Cuban enterprises of Cubans both on the island and abroad. This is a clear example of how a change in circumstances leads to a change in policy: the Cuban diaspora was already large, but the recent exodus has forced Cuba to open up new windows for economic relations with them.

Opening up to foreign investment is not a novelty in the history of socialism. During the NEP, after the collapse of all hope in an immediate world revolution, Lenin had hoped to build socialism with the help of the investment of foreign capital. As Lewin explains, for Lenin “only big capital possessed the qualities that were useful to progress: its ability to organize on a large scale, its tendency to plan and its sense of discipline.”^[51] This was, again, a momentary and necessary concession in the name of development and efficiency. This was also one of the central aims of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, which materialized in the creation of Special Economic Zones with specific economic policies designed to attract foreign investment and enterprises. Cuba had created the Mariel Special Development Zone in 2013 as an international trade area to attract foreign investment, but these measures seem to imply a qualitative leap that applies beyond a specific area of the island.

This decentralization has now reached sectors which would have been unthinkable some years ago. For example, the monopoly of the Central Bank of Cuba (BCC) is broken — private banks are allowed to open on the island, but they will ‘operate under the supervision of the BCC on equal regulatory conditions with state banking’ (measure 84). This kind of taboo-breaking also extended to land exploitation: per measure 58, land ownership is still socialised but a new category of usufruct for ‘an indeterminate time,’ distinguishing here again between ownership and management. Surface rights are extended for 99 years, while usufruct for foreign investment, a new possibility, is limited at up to 50 years (measure 120). Furthermore, buying and selling real estate is also allowed now (measure 122).

Any solid historical explanation of these changes should stress the central point that they were prompted by the historical trajectory of US intervention within Cuba and Latin America in general — most notably the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, alongside 32 Cuban soldiers. Venezuela was Cuba’s closest ally and a key source of fuel, a loss that was worsened by a total fuel blockade against Cuba set out by the US. Measures such as the legalization of private imports and commercialization of fuel in Cuba (Measure 52) highlight that these are desperate measures to circumvent a limitation that has a clear culprit: a bipartisan plot of the United States against Cuba.

On the other hand, these reforms also tackle issues created by the previous reforms themselves. A long-announced reform, Measure 70 announces the shift from ‘subsidies for products’ to ‘subsidies for people’; instead of financing basic products for all citizens, the new aim is to only help those with a lower income to have access to those products. In this sense, these reforms acknowledge what is a well-known secret: that Cuba is now a class society with elements of inequality. Remittances are an important factor, but this is also a consequence of the previous reforms. This situation will, by all means, only deepen: companies are now allowed to hire more than 100 employees (measure 20), citizens can own more than one business (measure 21), and can also have shares in more than one (measure 23).

The limitations on accumulation presented by previous reforms are now being eroded, raising legitimate questions about the nature of the Cuban economy and society. The destiny of the Cuban Revolution cannot be deduced from a close reading of these measures, but from an analysis of the day-to-day actions of the Cuban government and bureaucracy and how they interact with the renewed anarchy of the market. That is the only way to fully understand the Cuban Revolution and any market opening reforms under Communist-led government: not as an outright rejection of the measures out of ideological orthodoxy, but as an understanding of the specificities of each country and each historical moment.

Marxists should engage with history in a way that is useful for the workers’ movement. That does not mean to give up on our scientific approach as historians, but to double down on it; to insist on the practical consequences and implications of our investigations. What have been the historically specific aspects of the different kinds of socialist states? Which of their limiting aspects can possibly be abolished? In other words, what do we have to repeat and what needs to change? If Marx defined Communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things,”^[52]what is ‘the present state of things’ and how can we work towards an understanding of the ‘real’ movement beyond ahistorical approaches to it? These are some of the basic questions if, paraphrasing the Maoist Jean-Luc Godard, we want to not just write political history, but to write history politically. History, understood as the sedimentation of reality, is the raw material for the socialist programme. Awareness of the limitations set by history is the first step towards overcoming them. Furthermore, that also means demystifying our own history and thinking seriously about the problems of socialist transition. As scientific socialist historians, we should also go beyond the romantic struggle of the guerrillas and get immersed in the problems and the routine of what preceded the revolution — arduous organizational work — and in what comes next, slowly eroding capitalist social relations from the office and the workplace. For a generation that has only known the barbarism of counter-revolution, it is hard to imagine that any of us will storm the Winter Palace. Even if revolution at the imperialist core appears as a distant hope, we still must work with humility to understand what the historical specificities of our times are and where the current weakest links lie. Today, we must link arms with the Sinwars of the present and pave the way for the Lenins of the future.

1. Albert Gil Gil, ‘¡Cuba Sí! Why All Socialists Should Care About Cuba’, Cosmonaut (8th June 2026).

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2. Odd Arne Westad, ‘Secrets of the Second World: The Russian Archives and the Reinterpretation of Cold War History’, Diplomatic History 21, 2 (1997), p. 264.

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3. Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba. Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959–1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

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4. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Friedrich Engels; Karl Marx, Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 3 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), p. 103.

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5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Routledge, 1983), p. IX.

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6. Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1 (Penguin, 1990), p. 99.

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7. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 22.

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8. Idem, p. 26.

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9. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (Vintage Books, 1975).

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10. Nikolai Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period (Routledge, 2003).

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11. Michael Charles Howard; John Edward King, A History of Marxian Economics. Volume 1, 1883-1929 (Princeton, 1989), p. 295.

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12. Lars T. Lih, What Was Bolshevism? (Brill, 2023), p. 305.

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13. Lewin, p. 17.

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14. Theryn Arnold, ‘Toward a Marxist State Theory of the Socialist Market Economy’, Cosmonaut (30th April 2026).

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15. Idem.

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16. Idem.

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17. Vladimir Ilich Ulianov ‘Lenin’, ‘Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ in Collected Works, Volume 30 (Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 107-117.

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18. Volodia, ‘Romper el hielo: Las trayectorias de la revolución mundial (1914-1949)’, in Marx XXI. Internacionalismo proletario (Nuevo Ciclo, 2026), p. 159.

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19. Vladimir Ilich Ulianov ‘Lenin’, ‘Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions,’ in Collected Works, Volume 31 (Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 244.

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20. Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Yale University Press, 2020), p.41.

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21. José Luis Rodríguez, ‘Fifty Years of Revolution in the Cuban Economy: A Brief Overview,’ in Al Campbell (Ed.), Cuban Economists on the Cuban Economy (University Press of Florida, 2013), p. 35.

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22. Volodia, p. 176.

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23. Yaffe, pp. 43-44.

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24. Yaffe, p. 51.

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25. Rodríguez, p. 36.

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26. Fidel Castro, ‘Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz en la clausura del Festival Juvenil Internacional Cuba Vive, efectuada en el Teatro "Carlos Marx", el 6 de agosto de 1995.’ Available from: <http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1995/esp/f060895e.html>.

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27. Yaffe, p. 58.

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28. Yaffe, p. 76.

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29. Antoni Kapcia, A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba (Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 141-2.

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30. Rodríguez, p. 50.

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31. Fidel Castro, ‘Discurso.’

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32. Kapcia, A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba, pp. 191-2.

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33. Antoni Kapcia, Leadership in the Cuban Revolution. The Unseen Story (Zed Books, 2014), p. 37.

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34. ‘Lineamientos de la política económica y social del Partido y la Revolución,’ VI Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba (18th April 2011), p. 9.

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35. Idem, p. 5.

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36. Idem, p. 10.

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37. Yaffe, pp. 223-224.

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38. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Friedrich Engels; Karl Marx, Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 24 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), p. 85.

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39. Idem, 86-87.

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40. Vladimir Ilich Ulianov ‘Lenin’, ‘The State and the Revolution,’ in Collected Works, Volume 25 (Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 472.

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41. Lineamientos, p. 11.

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42. ‘Lineamientos de la política económica y social del Partido y la Revolución para el período 2016-2021’ (July 2017), p. 3.

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43. Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Yale University Press, 2020).

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44. Yaffe, p. 200.

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45. ‘Charting a New Course on Cuba’ (2016). Available from: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/node/352651.

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46. Yaffe, p. 250.

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47. Artículo 22, Constitución de la República de Cuba, 2019. Available from: <https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Cuba_2019?lang=es>.

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48. Artículo 18, Constitución de la República de Cuba, 2019.

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49. Miguel Díaz-Canel; Ignacio Ramonet, ‘Entrevista Concedida a Ignacio Ramonet, Catedrático y Periodista Español.’ Presidencia y Gobierno de Cuba. Available from: <https://cubaminrex.cu/es/entrevista-concedida-por-el-presidente-miguel-diaz-canel-bermudez-ignacio-ramonet-catedratico-y>.

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50. Oscar Figueredo Reinaldo (et al.), ‘Cuba en datos: Hoy somos menos de 10 millones de cubanos residentes,’ CubaDebate (19th July 2024). Available from: <http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2024/07/19/hoy-somos-menos-de-10-millones-de-cubanos-residentes/>.

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51. Lewin, p. 27.

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52. Friedrich Engels; Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Friedrich Engels; Karl Marx, Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 5 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), p. 49.

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