OPINION English edition of José Luis Tan Estrada’s column originally published March 16, 2026. References to proposals and economic figures reflect that original date.
The regime that destroyed Cuba’s economy now asks the people who left to help
In March 2026, the Cuban regime was weighing Cuban diaspora investment: allowing Cubans living abroad to invest directly in private businesses on the island. If implemented, the measure would join Decree-Law 114/2025, which provides for mixed limited liability companies involving state and private businesses. Havana presented these initiatives as historic reforms, signs of openness and gestures of modernization.
The idea was presented on March 16, 2026, by Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, who is also minister of foreign trade and foreign investment, on the state television program Mesa Redonda. As elTOQUE reported that day, he said emigrants would be able to partner with private businesses and open foreign-currency accounts in Cuban banks.
Do not be fooled. What the regime calls a “historic turn” is a tactical retreat by a system that has spent more than six decades systematically destroying what it now claims to want to build.
This Cubanos por el Mundo video, in Spanish, covers a call by Esteban Lazo to take away property as a way to make an example of business owners.
Cuba and diaspora investment: video referenced in the original column. Watch on YouTube.
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Table of Contents
A history of destruction, 1959–2026
To understand the proposed opening, remember what came before it.
After taking power in 1959, Fidel Castro launched one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping campaigns of confiscation. Agrarian reform dismantled large estates and greatly expanded state control over land. A July 1960 constitutional change widened the government’s expropriation powers. Laws 890 and 891, adopted that October, nationalized major Cuban industrial and commercial enterprises and private banks, alongside the broader nationalization drive against foreign-owned businesses. In 1961, Law 989 provided for the confiscation of property belonging to people who permanently left the country.
Private enterprise was progressively erased.
Then, in March 1968, Castro launched the “Revolutionary Offensive.” Tens of thousands of small businesses—grocery stores, butcher shops, workshops, barbershops, restaurants and bars—were taken over. The original column puts the total at roughly 55,000 to 58,000. Owners lost control of businesses they had built, while management passed to the state and its political organizations. It was the final blow to what remained of Cuba’s small urban commercial sector.
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The endless cycle: open, close, open again
What followed became a familiar pattern: economic crisis, a limited opening, partial recovery, authoritarian retreat and another crisis.
In the 1970s, Cuba adopted a Soviet-inspired economic management system. Limited market mechanisms, including farmers’ markets introduced in 1980, later offered space for activity outside the rigid state distribution system. In 1986, Castro’s campaign to “rectify errors and negative tendencies” shut farmers’ markets and rolled back market-oriented practices. Cuba entered the Special Period with few alternatives to a failing state supply system.
After the Soviet collapse and the economic catastrophe of the 1990s, the regime conceded ground again. Self-employment was expanded and legalized in specified activities in 1993. Tens of thousands sought licenses. But fines, enforcement campaigns and heavy taxes constrained the opening. For years, the licensed self-employed sector remained narrow.
In 2004, the government stopped issuing new licenses for 40 of the 157 authorized activities. Existing licenses could not simply be transferred to new operators. Aspiring taxi drivers, lodging providers and mechanics found doors closed. Informal activity filled part of the gap.
Raúl Castro’s presidency brought another round of promises: major cuts to state payrolls, more self-employment licenses and permission to hire workers. Taxes and suffocating administrative controls limited the space citizens actually gained.
In 2021, the regime legalized micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, known as mipymes, as though it had invented a revolutionary advance. The opening came decades late and with a long list of prohibited activities, restrictions and approval requirements. An August 2024 regulatory package imposed further controls, including restrictions on wholesale trade.
Decades passed. The same cycle returned again and again.
The proposal Havana rejected in 2012
One earlier episode deserves attention. In 2012, Cuban Americans for Engagement, or CAFE—a group criticized by members of the exile community as sympathetic to Havana—met with Cuban officials at the country’s United Nations mission. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez participated.
CAFE brought moderate proposals, framed cautiously. One was essentially the idea raised again in 2026: open private enterprise, especially small and medium-sized businesses, to investment by Cubans living abroad.
According to the account discussed in the original column, Rodríguez rejected it, along with proposals to bring migration practices closer to international standards, establish reconciliation commissions and remove the prejudices and obstacles impeding cultural exchange between emigrants and people on the island.
Fourteen years later, the crisis was much worse and the regime was considering what it had previously refused. The issue was not a newfound respect for Cubans abroad. It was the need for resources.
Decree-Law 114/2025: an opening under state supervision
Alongside the possible diaspora investment measure, Decree-Law 114/2025 introduced mixed limited liability companies involving state and private enterprises. Havana called it another historic change. The concern raised in this column is that such arrangements could allow inefficient state businesses to gain control over successful private ventures.
A partnership is not equal when one participant also controls the rules, the approvals and the political authorities that enforce them. The possibility of majority state ownership or absorption of a private company must be considered in that context. Government approval requirements leave entrepreneurs dependent on ministries, while areas such as health, education and defense remain under state control.
That is a supervised association, rather than a partnership between equals.
The original column cited estimates that the private sector accounted for 55% of retail sales in 2025 and roughly 15% of GDP. Those estimates require a clear source and a definition of the sector counted. The underlying argument does not depend on treating them as audited totals: the regime was reacting to the importance of private activity, not leading a consistent campaign for economic freedom.
What looks new to Cubans abroad should embarrass the world
The possibility of Cuban diaspora investment understandably raises hopes. Many emigrants have spent years sending money to relatives and would welcome a chance to build a family business or a project of their own. That aspiration is human and legitimate.
But the broader question is uncomfortable: why could selected foreign investors gain access to approved ventures while so many Cubans living in Miami or Madrid faced barriers to investing in the country of their birth?
Foreign investment was not unrestricted. It required government permission. Yet the regime was willing to negotiate with foreign capital while treating the independence, memory and political voice of its own emigrants as a threat. It preferred outsiders it could manage to Cubans who might return with resources and demands.
Governments, businesses and institutions that supported Havana without insisting on accountability should reflect on what they were sustaining. Financing a dictatorship that denies its citizens rights it selectively grants outsiders is not a neutral act of cooperation.
Without guarantees, Cuban diaspora investment can become another trap
The real value of any diaspora investment reform depends on something the regime has never credibly secured: predictable legal rights. Where courts lack independence, rules change by decree and confiscation remains a threat, an investment can become an expensive act of faith.
The history is consistent. Openings have been followed by reversals. Promises have come with fine print. Historic turns have left the state in control.
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At the time of the original March 16 column, the official details of the diaspora proposal had not been fully published. Expectations were being managed while the public waited. That was the situation being criticized, rather than a claim about the proposal’s status today.
After decades of abuse, the regime asks its victims for help
Cuba does not need the world’s help to survive as a dictatorship. It needs freedom. Its people should be able to return, invest, build and live without asking a ministry for permission, fearing confiscation or waiting for an inspector to decide whether their business may exist.
What the regime offers late, reluctantly and in crisis is a fragment of what should always have been a right. The chronology is telling: mass expropriations after 1959, the elimination of small private commerce in 1968, the closure of farmers’ markets in 1986, licensing restrictions in 2004 and renewed controls in 2024.
And in 2012, Cubans asking for a modest investment opening were told no.
A dictatorship that takes 67 years to “discover” that Cubans should be able to invest in their own country deserves neither applause nor an uncritical narrative of historic openness.
Editor’s note: what changed after the column
Since the original column appeared, Havana has moved from announcement to regulation. Decree-Law 117 and its regulations took effect on May 5, 2026, upon publication in the Gaceta Oficial, Diario Las Américas reported. The rule creates a migration status for Cubans living abroad who act as investors or business owners.
To obtain it, applicants must go through a Cuban consulate with an approved business project and a relationship with a Cuban economic entity. The measure also ends the “emigrado” classification applied to people who spent more than 24 consecutive months abroad. Separate provisions of the Migration Law, due to take effect within 180 days, would let Cubans abroad keep their property on the island after more than two years away.
