Cuba's President Calls for Urgent Economic Changes Amidst Crisis

Cuba’s economy needs urgent changes to overcome a crisis intensified by a US oil blockade, the president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has 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 changes aimed at boosting the growing private sector as the island, under pressure from Washington, undergoes an economic crisis.

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

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

The oil blockade imposed by 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 changes, widely seen as a desperate, 11th-hour bid to stave off economic collapse, have won the backing of the 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”.

It is unclear whether the changes will satisfy Trump, who is pushing for a change in Cuba’s economic model, if not its leaders.