He calls for immediate, profound, and executable transformations.

On Wednesday, President Miguel Diaz-Canel participated in the closing ceremony of the Extraordinary Plenum of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee, held at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana.

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During the event, the Cuban leader assessed the country’s economic situation, highlighting challenges that demand “unity, ideological firmness, courage, audacity and creative resistance.”

“The context is extraordinarily complex and challenging due to the incessant aggressiveness of the intensified economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the U.S. government and the criminal purpose of the hostile actions of the current administration: first, the inclusion of Cuba on the infamous and spurious list of countries that supposedly sponsor terrorism, and other equally false accusations that seek to discredit the government’s authority, while depriving the country of any source of foreign currency income,” Diaz-Canel said.

The Cuban leader defended the reforms approved the previous day by the Communist Party, calling them “necessary and not deferrable.”

Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel:

To the Cuban living abroad who wants to invest, donate, import technology, open a market, or build a project in his homeland, we will offer a clear, stable, and respectful framework, without being viewed with suspicion for wanting to help his… pic.twitter.com/VwyjWaDqyP

— The Spot (@Spotnewsth) June 18, 2026

During a speech that lasted about 40 minutes, Diaz-Canel outlined the direction of Cuban economic policy, which can be summarized in the following 12 statements:

Solutions, not Delays

“These are not new ideas; they are decisions the country discussed and approved years ago. The mistake was not in proposing them, but in having postponed them. And that stage of postponement must end … Cuba does not need more delays; it needs solutions. It is not about creating more offices or multiplying meetings, but about achieving concrete results.”

Responding to Reality

“Reality imposes urgent and necessary changes on us. And when people’s lives become so hard, the first duty of the Communist Party of Cuba and the revolutionary government is not to explain the crisis better; it is to change whatever must be changed to overcome it.”

Executable Transformations

“A deep and agile economic agenda is required, executable in the short term, that combines macroeconomic stabilization, incentives to stimulate and promote productive opening, legal security, attraction of investment, intensive use of technology and focused and effective social protection.”

Areas for Immediate Action

“It is necessary to advance on at least five simultaneous fronts: macroeconomic stabilization and recovery of external income; transformation of the economic and social model; stimulation and recovery of the agricultural productive sector; strengthening of accounting and cost management; and the anticipation and mitigation of the social costs associated with the necessary transformations of the economic and social model.”

Non-Deferrable Decisions

“What we propose to set in motion is an emergency economic and social agenda … along with decisions that cannot keep waiting. Some will not have absolute consensus, but they are not deferrable.”

Real Prices

“We need to unleash productive forces, so that there is more production instead of more restriction. Because it has been proven that control without supply only shifts operations to the informal market… True social justice is not sustained on artificial prices that later end up becoming scarcity, lines, low wages and illegal markets.”

Social Justice

“If there is no wealth, there is nothing to distribute. We would be talking about social justice in the abstract … And we have to produce wealth ourselves. And if there is no wealth, there is no social justice. Either we produce under these conditions, create wealth and then distribute with social justice, with equity, not with egalitarianism.”

Foreign Investment

“We must not only tell the foreign investor where to invest, but also let him take the initiative to invest in the economic sector of his interest, as well as directly choose his workers without state intermediaries… We must always authorize direct foreign investment in the national private sector, including MSMEs, with clear rules on ownership, repatriation, reinvestment and dispute resolution.”

Debt-for-Asset Swaps

“We must conduct a process of debt-for-asset swaps, focused fundamentally on swapping national assets for debts, without alienating ownership of them in perpetuity. With this mechanism, financing and other benefits can be achieved without losing the property rights over the assets.”

Legal Security

“Legal security must be guaranteed — contracts, usufructs, leases, concessions, surface rights and licenses with temporal stability and protection against arbitrary changes. If there is no legal security, no one invests, no one takes risks.”

Defense of Socialism

“The transformations we are presenting are to advance in the defense of socialism, to support and expand social justice, to create economic wealth and distribute it with equity, not with egalitarianism. That is the challenge.”

#Cuba | President Miguel Diaz-Canel stated that current social realities demand immediate and necessary transformations across the country.

Speaking about national challenges, the Cuban leader emphasized that when citizens’ daily lives become increasingly difficult, the primary… pic.twitter.com/FYyqoq5sfR

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) June 18, 2026

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Sources: CCP – EFE

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