OPINION | Cubanos por el Mundo English edition of Ernesto García’s column originally published October 5, 2026.
Foreign assistance to Cuba raises a question the Castro regime has avoided for decades: after so many subsidies, loans, shipments and forgiven debts, why must Cubans still wait for someone in another country to provide what their own work cannot buy?
That question runs through our Instagram post about Cuba and the Marshall Plan. It also runs through Cubanos por el Mundo’s investigation into Soviet assistance, Venezuela’s support and debt forgiveness. The documents do not provide a magic number that explains everything. They reveal something more politically uncomfortable: extraordinary opportunities and a dependency that outlived the countries supplying them.
A government can celebrate a ship’s arrival. A family needs to know whether it will have food after that ship is gone.
View the post referenced in the original column on Instagram.
Table of Contents
Foreign assistance to Cuba was no footnote
Carmelo Mesa-Lago’s data series, reproduced by Jorge F. Pérez-López and examined in our investigation, estimates Soviet economic support between 1960 and 1990 at $65.119 billion in contemporary dollars. That includes $39.390 billion in nonrepayable price subsidies and $25.729 billion in loans.
These were not suitcases of cash unloaded in Havana. They were trade advantages, financing and preferential terms that sustained imports and projects. For a small economy, having a partner willing to finance such imbalances for decades represented substantial support.
Our approximation puts that assistance at about $270 billion in August 2026 dollars. The adjustment uses U.S. inflation and distributes the amounts uniformly within the periods covered by the series. It helps illustrate scale; it does not pretend to supply annual precision the available data cannot support.
The decisive questions begin after the total. What productive capacity remained? Which businesses learned to compete? How much freedom did ordinary citizens gain to create wealth without seeking permission from the political apparatus?
The disappearance of Soviet support exposed an economy unable to sustain much of its trade through its own resources. That outcome demands scrutiny of the decisions made by those who managed the resources and concentrated political power.
The Marshall Plan’s lesson lies in what followed
The Marshall Plan provided $13.3 billion in contemporary dollars for European recovery during the four years following its approval in 1948, according to the U.S. National Archives. It helped rebuild economies devastated by war.
Comparisons with Cuba require care. Four years of recovery assistance and three decades of subsidies and loans are not equivalent periods. Neither were the populations, industrial structures, institutions or international conditions. Dividing two nominal sums and announcing a winner would misrepresent both experiences.
The comparison worth discussing is different: did assistance reduce dependence, or finance its continuation?
Europe did not rebuild simply because it received money. It had workers, knowledge, businesses and capabilities that could be put back to work. Foreign support helped that process. In Cuba, political leaders spent decades defending a model that subordinated economic decisions to the preservation of state control.
The model’s problem becomes clear when production, investment and the correction of mistakes depend on the preferences of a hierarchy that does not have to compete for votes. Assistance buys time. Time alone does not create a viable economy.
Changing suppliers did not end the dependence
After the Soviet Union, Venezuela became a crucial source of support. It supplied oil, financing arrangements and payments for professional services administered by the Cuban state. Our investigation documents the relationship’s importance and an essential distinction: Cuba also provided services. All bilateral trade cannot be counted as a donation.
There is therefore no need to present a cumulative total of tens of billions of dollars in “free oil” as an established fact when available contracts do not allow the net subsidy to be isolated. Criticism of Castroism is stronger when every figure can be defended.
The political argument remains: after losing its main patron, the regime again organized much of its survival around another. An economy dependent on an ally’s capacity and willingness to provide support is exposed when that ally enters a crisis.
Cubans should not have to follow another capital’s political calendar to know how long the lights will stay on at home.
The debts were forgiven. Accountability was missing
New financial opportunities followed. Russia agreed in 2014 to cancel $31.7 billion in nominal Soviet-era debt. The 2015 agreement with Paris Club creditors provided approximately $8.5 billion in relief, largely involving overdue interest.
Those sums must not be added to Soviet support as though money entered Cuba a second time. Forgiving an obligation changes what must be repaid. It does not deliver the original loan again.
Debt relief nevertheless has a political consequence: it creates room to act. That room requires questions about which decisions changed, which investments improved people’s lives and who examined the results. CPM has long highlighted the lack of information surrounding the foreign debt Cubans are kept in the dark about.
A creditor can renegotiate a balance. Citizens have the right to demand something deeper: public accounts showing what was contracted, who decided, what was received and what remains.
Prosperity requires citizens with power
Humanitarian assistance can feed a family, bring medicine to a hospital or ease an emergency. Those concrete benefits deserve respect. No Cuban should be denied help to make a political argument more forceful.
What deserves challenge is the transformation of emergency into a society’s normal condition while its rulers retain the exclusive right to decide and the privilege of never answering for the results.
The way forward requires allowing citizens to produce, trade, save, invest and organize under predictable rules. It requires protecting property and contracts, subjecting public enterprises to scrutiny and allowing journalists to investigate without reprisals. It also requires a government that can lose power when it fails.
Foreign assistance to Cuba has sustained activity and eased hardship. It has not replaced those freedoms. Another loan, another shipment or another debt cancellation cannot, by itself, accomplish what the regime refuses to permit.
After so many decades, demanding an accounting is the minimum. Cubans deserve an economy in which well-being depends increasingly on what they can build and decreasingly on what another government chooses to send.
Success will come when earning a living through one’s own work is no longer merely a promise.
Sources and methodology: This column offers an editorial interpretation of CPM’s investigation published September 29, 2026. Soviet figures include subsidies and loans; their equivalent in August 2026 dollars is approximate. Debt forgiveness is presented separately and is not counted as new assistance. The Marshall Plan comparison does not equate time periods, populations or economic effects.
