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  • About Luxury hotels stand empty as inequality grows and children beg on Havana’s streets

Can capitalism save Cuba’s revolution?

Le Monde diplomatique · 2026-07-31

Cuba is undergoing its biggest economic transformation in decades: private firms are back and small businesses employ a quarter of the workforce. But market reform has brought no political opening.

Anewly renovated turquoise house stands out in tired Havana. Two fruit trees shade its patio; a swing stands on the artificial grass and the front windows are tinted for privacy. An elderly woman sitting by the entrance in a wheelchair was talking to herself. She’s a resident of TaTamanía, Cuba’s first private care home, which opened this spring in the capital’s Vedado district. This type of business was long prohibited under the revolution, but in recent years, a lack of resources has left public care facilities in a critical state.

A former paediatrician, Yadira Álvarez, and her husband, Rolando Pérez, an IT specialist, set up this ‘mipyme’ – the Cuban term for the small and medium enterprises which have sprung up in their thousands since they were authorised in 2021. After the pandemic, Havana liberalised the economy, hoping to prevent its collapse under the combined weight of the US embargo in force since 1962; the ‘maximum pressure’ policy of Donald Trump’s first term, which brought in 243 coercive measures; and the health crisis and a currency reform that caused soaring inflation. This first major change was introduced as the largest anti-government protest movement seen here since 1959 shook the regime, which responded by cracking down harshly on demonstrations.

Havana has been in Washington’s sights even more in Trump’s second term, with the president making repeated threats to ‘take’ the island. On 29 January 2026, three weeks after successfully demanding that the Venezuelan authorities left in place after President Nicolás Maduro’s abduction cease all oil deliveries to Cuba, he declared that the island constitutes ‘an unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security and foreign policy of the United States’. Any country that supplies hydrocarbons to Cuba now faces US tariffs.

The economic, commercial and financial vice is tightening as Washington expands the scope of its sanctions: since 1 May these have (…)

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Julia Neima

(1)First names have been changed.

(2)‘Report on Illicit Drugs in the Czech Republic 2023’,www.drogy-info.cz/.

(3)‘Synthetic stimulants – the current situation in Europe (European Drug Report 2026)’, EU Drugs Agency,www.euda.europa.eu

(4)‘Drugs on the front line: The war in Ukraine is fuelling drug use among soldiers, particularly of synthetic substances’, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), January 2024, globalinitiative.net/.

(5)‘Synthetic stimulants – the current situation in Europe(European Drug Report 2026)’, June 2026,www.euda.europa.eu/.

(6)See ‘EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment (EU-SOCTA)’, 2025,www.europol.europa.eu/.

(7)‘24 industrial-scale labs dismantled in the largest-ever operation against synthetic drugs’, January 2026,www.europol.europa.eu/.

(8)‘Wastewater analysis and drugs – a multi-city study’, 2026,www.euda.europa.eu/.

(9)‘Complexities and conveniences of the international drug trade: The involvement of Mexican criminal actors in the EU drug market’, December 2022,www.europol.europa.eu/.

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