Cuban economy needs ‘urgent changes’ as US blockade deepens crisis, says president

Cuba’s economy needs “urgent changes” to overcome a major crisis intensified by a US oil blockade, president Miguel Díaz-Canel 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 reforms aimed at boosting the growing private sectoras the island, under pressure from Washington, undergoes a major economic crisis. Some of the reforms “will not have absolute consensus but cannot be postponed,” Díaz-Canel stressed. “When people’s lives become this hard,” the Communist party and government had a responsibility to “change what needs to be changed” rather than try to explain away the crisis, he said. The oil blockade imposed by president 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. …