Cuba's National Assembly passed a 176-measure economic reform package on 18 June 2026, the deepest market opening since the 1960s nationalisations. The National Assembly is Cuba's unicameral legislature, which meets in special session to ratify legislation the Communist Party has already approved. It legalises private banks, dollar bank accounts for private actors, a cryptocurrency framework, and fuel imports by the non-state sector. It cuts ministries from 27 to roughly 20, scraps the 100-worker cap on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), removes general price caps, and narrows subsidies to the most vulnerable. President Miguel Diaz-Canel announced the package on 12 June; a Communist Party plenum approved it on 17 June; parliament passed it the next day.
The measures route around exactly what the sanctions disabled. Private banking answers the Visa and Mastercard cutoff; dollar accounts answer an informal exchange rate that hit a record 600 pesos and has since climbed to 6701; fuel imports answer the designation of the state oil firm CUPET that froze state supply. Diaz-Canel told lawmakers, "We are not doing this because of Yankee pressure"2. The independent Cuban economist Pedro Monreal named the catch: the reforms cannot work without four inputs, energy, foreign currency, technology and external demand3. Each maps to a sanction already biting. Fuel is blocked by the CUPET designation; foreign currency is choked by the card-rail cutoff and the US blacklisting of GAESA, the military business conglomerate; external demand is gutted by a tourism collapse; US-origin technology has been off-limits under the embargo for decades.
The UN Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) projects a 6.5% contraction this year and 10.3% cumulative across 2025 and 20264, a fall on the scale of the 1990s Special Period. That means a second lost decade of shrinking wages, shortages and emigration for ordinary Cubans. The sequencing mirrors China's 1980s and Vietnam's doi moi, both of which legalised private capital before liberalising the state sector. Both Asian openings ran on rising export demand and inbound capital, the precise external inputs the 1996 Helms-Burton architecture and the Trump administration's secondary tariffs are designed to deny Cuba.
State media frames the package as a Vietnam-model opening, and opposition figure Manuel Cuesta Morua called the changes "belated Chinese-style reforms"5. Both readings can hold and still leave the package as enabling legislation for a market the preconditions do not yet support. Monreal's framing is the load-bearing one: the reform changes what becomes possible if sanctions ease, not what is possible now.
