03 March 2025
President Díaz-Canel has called for the Ministry of Economy and Planning (MEP) to “have a clear strategy and more coherent thinking on economic issues in the difficult circumstances which the country is facing.”
In unusually direct language, he said that the Ministry must from now on carry out a permanent analysis of economic events, as well as a comparative analysis of what is happening in the world.
The President’s remarks, reported on the Presidency website, were reflected in a separate report in Granma of more direct comments made by Cuba’s Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, who called for a radical redesign of the MEP so that its structure and functionality respond to the need for a war economy.
Granma wrote that after acknowledging the objectivity of the MEP’s 2024 report, the Prime Minister “assessed that the results achieved in 2024 are far from what is required to relaunch, recover and strengthen the economy.”
Addressing the situation that Cuba is now facing following growing pressure from the Trump Administration and the rapidly changing geopolitical environment, Marrero told the annual review meeting that the MEP must now deliver “its share of responsibility for all the projections of the Government Programme to revive the economy.”
In 2025, he said, these responsibilities will include monitoring a new mechanism for the allocation and control of foreign currency, the partial dollarisation of the economy, and the necessary transformation of the socialist state enterprise, and an accompanying future new law.
This would mean, Marrero insisted, the MEP strengthening its leading role in managing these processes, and in others including planning, the development of productive chains between state and non-state economic actors, as well as overseeing the recovery of the national electrical energy system, the delivery of national investments, and the decentralisation of power to Cuba’s territories.
In language that a appeared to suggest the meeting was combative, Granma reported that “in the heat of the interventions” that followed, President Díaz-Canel intervened after a presentation by the Minister of Economy and Planning Joaquín Alonso,. According to Granma, Cuba’s President suggested “that given the impossibility of completing the workforce templates, it is necessary to resort to digital transformation, science and innovation, and artificial intelligence.”
In language also critical of the MEP’s approach, he said that “institutional communication must [now] be more present” in the organisation “to explain the scope of the economic measures” and with the support of economists, the ministry must nationally “counteract the entire hegemonic wave of the right and neoliberalism against Cuba [to] promote the political economy.”
According to the Presidency website, Díaz-Canel made clear that given the economically active population in Cuba is increasingly smaller, the MEP must optimise its processes, use science and innovation to promote economic research and “share the content of our economists in multiple spaces, including on social networks.”
Highlights in this issue:
- Díaz-Canel and Communist Party Secretary stress importance of maintaining political unity
- Marrero calls for a new approach to tourism
- Central Bank licences foreign cryptocurrency virtual service provider
- US imposes new sanctions on Cuban and foreign officials linked to health programmes
- Washington stops issuing visas to Cubans travelling on official passports
In a reference to staff concerns about shortages of qualified personnel within the MFP, it noted that the meeting “discussed dissatisfaction, encouraging experiences, and also how much remains to be done within the sector to achieve the results that the country needs for more than two hours.”
Tellingly, the Presidency website also noted: “This is a crucial ministry for the development of the nation, which has not yet managed to take advantage of all its potential. This was the opinion of the participants in the review meeting, who agreed on the need to work, from all areas, in accordance with the war economy that the nation is experiencing.”
“They also agreed on the importance of strengthening MFP job stability and paying special attention to talent and expertise, thus using the best knowledge for development; updating economic management; identifying bureaucratic information that slows down decision-making; increasing controls on the efficient use of energy sources, as well as advancing the integration of the productive base into the planning process.”
The website also reported that the priorities for 2025 will be: the implementation of the 2030 National Plan for Economic and Social Development; advancing the improvement of annual planning; transforming the control system for the management of the economy with a more integrative and participatory approach; prioritising the control of the execution of investments, with a greater impact on the economy and the population; advancing the comprehensive transformation of Socialist State Enterprise; achieving its effective link with the rest of the actors in the economy; and strengthening the internal functioning of the MFP.
03 March 2025, Issue 1269
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