[News] Cuba’s Participatory Path in a Time of Economic Siege and the Contradictions of Western Capitalism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Cuba’s Participatory Path in a Time of Economic Siege and the
Contradictions of Western Capitalism
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By Isaac Saney on November 25, 2025

Amid one of the most severe economic moments since the triumph of the
Revolution—and under the weight of a suffocating, ever-expanding U.S.
imperial siege—Cuba is attempting something that remains almost unthinkable
in the so-called advanced capitalist democracies: it is involving its
citizenry directly, consciously, and systematically in charting the
country’s economic future. While the wealthy western nations increasingly
marginalize their own working populations, Cuba insists that the resolution
of the crisis must be a collective, participatory, and profoundly
democratic undertaking.

On October 26, 2025, the Cuban government released a comprehensive 92-page
programmatic document outlining a far-reaching roadmap for confronting the
country’s current economic challenges. This blueprint articulates a
coordinated effort built around 10 general objectives, 106 specific
objectives, 342 concrete actions, and 264 indicators and targets—a level of
detail that underscores both the gravity of the situation and the
seriousness of the proposed response. The overarching goal is clear: to
advance the gradual recovery of the economy and to overcome the complex and
multifaceted crisis facing the nation, a crisis exacerbated by external
pressures, structural vulnerabilities, and the intensification of the U.S.
blockade. Through this framework, the government aims to mobilize
institutions, enterprises, territorial bodies, and the population in a
unified effort to stabilize and revitalize the country’s economic life.

Far from treating the population as passive spectators to high-level
technocratic decisions, Cuba has embarked on an expansive national process
of consultation, debate, and popular input tied to the Government Program
to correct distortions and revitalize the economy. This program—composed of
ten general objectives and 106 interconnected specific objectives—has
become the framework through which the state seeks to address the crisis
with the people, not over their heads.

*Popular Consultation as a Framework of Governance*

During a session of the Council of State chaired by Esteban Lazo Hernández,
and attended by President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez and Prime Minister
Manuel Marrero Cruz, the country’s leadership underscored the centrality of
the mass consultation unfolding between November 15 and December 30.
Díaz-Canel described this process as a “participatory and contributory
exercise of collective construction”—a mechanism not only for strengthening
the Government Program through the population’s proposals, but for
deepening public understanding of the economic challenges and mobilizing
society for their resolution.

This is not democracy as periodic elections or focus-grouped messaging; it
is democracy as substantive engagement. The aim is to ensure that the
population is not merely informed of decisions but is drawn into the
process of deliberation, critique, and co-creation. In a context of extreme
scarcity, intensified blockade pressure, and deep structural constraints,
Cuba insists on the principle that the people must be protagonists of the
country’s economic reconstruction.

By contrast, in western capitalist countries—where political systems claim
democratic superiority—working people are systematically excluded from
meaningful economic decision-making. Policies shaping austerity, taxation,
labour markets, monetary policy, and social programs are dictated by
technocrats, corporate executives, employers’ associations, and
unaccountable financial institutions. Elections change little; voters are
treated as consumers of political brands, not active participants in
forging a national course. The result is widespread political cynicism,
alienation, and a sense that politics is something done to the people, not
with them. Cuba’s approach stands as a rebuke to this hollowed-out model.

*The Government Program: Crisis Management through Collective Input*

Central to Cuba’s strategy is the understanding that economic stabilization
cannot be imposed from above. As Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva
Fraga emphasized, the Program operates through a system of constant
monitoring, debate, and public discussion. This reflects the nature of
Cuba’s economy—an open, trade-dependent system in which key imports such as
fuel and food are distorted by the U.S. blockade and by the country’s
forced exclusion from the international financial system. The blockade’s
intensification, coupled with Cuba’s placement on the U.S. list of state
sponsors of terrorism, severely obstructs banking operations, investment
flows, and the basic functioning of trade.

Given this hostile terrain, the Program seeks to strengthen internal
capacities: increasing domestic food production, incentivizing national
industry, reducing import dependency, and fostering the development and
autonomy of socialist enterprises and territorial governments. The
objective is not simply economic adjustment but a transformation of the
economic system that preserves social equity and socialist principles.

*Macroeconomic Stabilization Without Abandoning the People*

Minister of Economy and Planning Joaquín Alonso Vázquez highlighted the
government’s efforts to reduce the fiscal deficit, acknowledging that while
progress has been made, the deficit remains high and continues to generate
inflationary pressures. Crucially, the Cuban leadership insists that
stabilization must occur “without anyone being left behind,” without
creating negative social impacts, and without sacrificing workers or
pensioners. This stands in stark contrast to Western neoliberal practice,
where macroeconomic stabilization—usually driven by austerity—almost always
falls on the shoulders of the poor, working class, and racialized
communities.

Despite enormous constraints, Cuba has managed to keep the current account
of the state budget in surplus and contain monetary issuance. The
government is simultaneously working to improve the National Tax
Administration Office, combat price violations—more than one million
detected—and restructure foreign currency management. These measures aim at
economic order, not violence against the social fabric.

*Production, Autonomy, and the Socialist Enterprise*

A core pillar of the Program is revitalizing the socialist state enterprise
and enabling territorial governments to participate more robustly in
economic development. Pérez-Oliva noted that Cuba must produce items—such
as sugar, honey, charcoal, and agricultural goods—that are currently
underutilized or underproduced. Import substitution is not framed as a
neoliberal obsession with self-sufficiency, but as a strategic priority to
retain scarce foreign currency and strengthen national sovereignty.

To accomplish this, enterprises must achieve greater financial autonomy and
responsiveness. The goal is to transform the Cuban business environment so
that economic actors operate within a stable macroeconomic framework, a
functional exchange market, and an efficient system for accessing wholesale
inputs—all while maintaining the socialist commitments to equity, universal
rights, and protection of the vulnerable.

*Social Protection and the Role of Cadres*

Cuba’s approach remains anchored in social justice. Deputy Prime Minister
Eduardo Martínez Díaz highlighted that the state is currently implementing
more than 30 social programs through 13 major policies, supported by
national, provincial, and municipal commissions. These initiatives
strengthen public healthcare, education, and the implementation of the Code
for Children, Adolescents, and Youth.

At the grassroots level, cadres play a decisive role in explaining,
debating, and mobilizing communities around the economic measures. Far from
the western stereotype of top-down socialist bureaucracy, this is a model
of socialist democracy rooted in popular consciousness, communication, and
collective responsibility. As Jorge Luis Broche Lorenzo noted, the Program
is a tactical tool aligned with Cuba’s long-term socialist model, and its
success depends on the synergy between economic policy and political
mobilization.

*Contrasting Models: Popular Power vs. Mass Alienation*

In advanced capitalist societies, economic restructuring, crisis
management, and policy design are driven by corporate lobbying, elite
interests, and financialized imperatives. The masses are spectators to
decisions made behind closed doors. Whether the issue is inflation,
recession, war spending, or tax policy, the majority has little input. Even
the most progressive leaders are constrained by corporate power, donor
class pressure, and economic structures dependent on inequality.
Participation is limited to voting every few years and watching political
theatre masquerade as democratic deliberation.

Cuba’s process—however imperfect, however challenged by scarcity,
bureaucracy, or external aggression—operates on different ethical and
political terrain. It insists that socialist democracy requires the active
involvement of workers, communities, and institutions in shaping the
economic path. It insists that consciousness, debate, and collective
mobilization remain indispensable to national survival. And it asserts that
the dignity of the people cannot be sacrificed to satisfy market forces or
foreign coercion.

*The Meaning of Participation Under Siege*

Cuba’s attempt to confront its economic crisis through mass consultation,
socialist democracy, and a participatory government program offers a
profound lesson in a world increasingly governed by oligarchic capitalism.
Under extreme pressure—blockade, sanctions, financial exclusion, global
inequality—Cuba chooses to expand rather than contract popular
participation. It refuses to accept the neoliberal logic that economic
decisions belong to experts and elites. Instead, it engages its people as
agents of transformation, defenders of sovereignty, and co-authors of the
nation’s future.

This commitment to popular participation is not an aberration or a
temporary response to crisis; it is a defining feature of the Cuban
Revolution. Time and again, Cuba has turned to its people as the principal
source of legitimacy, creativity, and political strength. The nationwide
debates on the 2019 Constitution and the recent Family Code—among the most
extensive and inclusive democratic consultations in the world—demonstrate
the Revolution’s insistence that major transformations must emerge from
broad social dialogue.

Most poignantly, the Workers’ Parliaments of 1994 stand as a testament to
this ethos. In the depths of the Special Period, between January and April,
more than 80,000 meetings were held across the island, engaging over four
million workers who discussed, debated, and generated thousands of
proposals to confront the economic crisis triggered by the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. These historic processes illustrate
that Cuba’s present national consultation is not an exception but part of a
deep revolutionary tradition in which the people are the protagonists of
their own destiny, even—and especially—under conditions of profound
hardship.

In contrast, the advanced capitalist states—wealthy, powerful, and
unencumbered by external siege—systematically exclude their own populations
from meaningful participation. The crisis of western democracy is
fundamentally a crisis of representation, disconnection, and oligarchic
domination.

Cuba, facing far greater obstacles, insists on a different way: a path
where the people, through struggle, debate, and collective will, chart the
course of their society. It is an affirmation that socialism is not merely
an economic model but a form of popular power—and that even in the harshest
conditions, the people must remain its authors and its protagonists.

*Isaac Saney* is a Black Studies and Cuba specialist at Dalhousie
University and coordinator of the Black and African Diaspora Studies
program. He is the author of several books including *Cuba, Africa and
Apartheid’s End: Africa’s Children Return*

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English
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