Julio César Guanche Explores "Crisis Tragedy, Its Exploitation, and Cuban People's Inability to Act"

On Tuesday, June 23, Cuban intellectual Julio César Guanche shared an essay on his Facebook profile titled "History and Inventory," where he critically examines the official narrative surrounding the 176 economic measures introduced by the regime on June 18 in front of the National Assembly.

Guanche begins with a distinction that sets the stage for his entire analysis: "History is one thing, and an inventory is another. If 1959 was history, 2026 seems like an inventory." According to him, the reforms—structured across 23 areas with more than 148 legal provisions affected—represent the deepest shift towards a market economy since the Revolution's victory. Yet, the official document frames it as a "sovereign exercise to preserve the achievements of the Revolution without abandoning socialism."

Analyzing the Textual Implications

His textual analysis is eye-opening: the word "worker" does not appear in any of the 23 sections; "union" is mentioned just once, in the context of capping wages based on the company's economic capacity; and the "Socialist State Enterprise" is instructed to transform into a "joint-stock company." His conclusion is straightforward: "The signifier remains, but the reference changes."

What the document fails to name, Guanche argues, has a clear name: structural adjustment. Its core measures—price liberalization, private banking, VAT, devaluations, removal of universal subsidies, and unrestricted opening to foreign investment—are typically recommended by global monetary institutions in their stabilization programs.

Envisioning Potential Scenarios

Based on this diagnosis, Guanche outlines three hypothetical scenarios. The first, a socialist renewal with worker control, is dismissed outright: "Worker control in Cuba is a fantasy." Since the 1960s, state socialism has dismantled labor self-organization, and when the party hierarchy reorganizes, he warns, "worker control doesn't emerge: administrative power converts into property."

The second scenario foresees a top-down transition negotiated among regime elites. Its structural limit, he points out, is corruption: former Deputy Prime Minister Alejandro Gil Fernández was removed from office in February 2024 and investigated for espionage, embezzlement, bribery, money laundering, and influence peddling.

The third option is a transition subservient to Washington, driven by the embargo, fuel cuts since January 2026, criminal charges against Raúl Castro, and sanctions on GAESA. Guanche warns that Venezuela offers the script: the regime change didn't improve wages or resolve the electricity crisis, but it did reform laws to open the model to foreign capital, which a sociologist described as formalizing an "economy of plunder and dispossession."

The Broader Humanitarian Crisis

According to Guanche, these three scenarios share the same logic: the document creates private economic actors that the one-party system cannot represent without transforming itself. The implicit deal is "developmental authoritarianism": economic freedom in exchange for political obedience. Miguel Díaz-Canel himself expressed this, perhaps unknowingly, by stating, "The first thing we need to do is produce. If we don't produce, if we don't generate wealth... what social justice are we going to defend?"

The essay also highlights exclusions that the 176 measures do not address: nearly half of Cuban women of working age are excluded from the formal market, racial stratification persists in wealth distribution, and the document replaces poverty and inequality with "multidimensional vulnerability," leaving their correction to the voluntary responsibility of businesses and communities.

Behind these omissions lies a humanitarian crisis with stark figures: infant mortality rose from 4.0 to 9.9 per 1,000 live births between 2018 and 2025; childhood cancer survival rates dropped from 85% to 65% due to a lack of cytostatics; over 12,000 children await surgery without supplies; and more than half of essential medicines are unavailable. For Guanche, this suffering has become a geopolitical bargaining chip: "pain turned into geopolitical currency."

The reforms, Guanche concludes, are too late and arrive at a society that the July 11, 2021, protests already showed to be disempowered. "Society reaches this moment disempowered, without its own political organization, and unable to endure further material hardship," he writes. His closing leaves no room for ambiguity: "The scenarios may be hypothetical. The tragedy of the crisis, its interested exploitation, and the inability of the Cuban people to intervene in its outcomes are not."