From the Revolutionary Offensive to leasing trucks to private firms: Castroism returns to the capitalism it destroyed

A state company in Matanzas is looking for private tenants for its Kamaz and ZIL trucks. It is the clearest picture yet of a country that, after almost 68 years of socialism, is letting private property and capitalism back in through the side door, while the Castro system keeps every lever of political power.

On November 9, the Matanzas branch of Azumat, a state logistics company, posted its Public Tender Call No. 2 on Facebook. It is aimed at “non-state forms of management,” the official euphemism for private businesses. What is on offer is the commercial lease of 12 state assets.

The list includes a 20-ton Kamaz 5410 tractor unit, ZIL 130 and Kamaz dump and flatbed trucks, a Renault truck, an MTZ 80 tractor and a GAZ jeep. Posted prices range from 100,000 to 250,000 Cuban pesos. Individuals and companies based in Cuba may bid, and sealed offers are due in Jovellanos by November 26.

In Las Tunas, the same thing happened with even less pretense. That same day, the provincial branch of Copextel announced on Facebook that it would lease two cargo vans for two or three years. The state company listed the faults itself: a 2005 Citroën Jumpy needs a new or rebuilt engine and has faulty wiring; a diesel Citroën Berlingo needs a full engine overhaul, bodywork and both suspensions, and its rims are dented and its tires unusable.

The post drew more than 600 comments, most of them mocking. “For rent: one corpse, just needs resurrecting,” one user wrote.

Both ads fit a shift the regime can no longer hide, one an old political saying sums up:

“Socialism is the longest and most painful road from capitalism to capitalism.”

The logic goes like this: centrally planned economies, after decades of shortages and of wrecking their own productive base, end up forced by material collapse to bring back markets, private property and investment just to survive. Whole generations pay for the round trip, landing back at the start poorer and with a distorted market run from the top.

What they destroyed: private property from 1959 to 1986

The dismantling of private property in Cuba was fast, legal in form and confiscatory in substance. In less than ten years almost nothing was left standing.

It began in the countryside with the first Agrarian Reform Law in May 1959. The second, on October 3, 1963, lowered the cap to 5 caballerías, about 67 hectares, and handed every farm above it to the state.

Industry fell in 1960. Law 851, of July 6, took over U.S. companies. Law 890, of October 13, nationalized the remaining large industries. Neither the Cuban nor the American owners were compensated. Banking passed to the state that same month.

The Urban Reform Law arrived on October 14, 1960: homes not lived in by their owners went to the tenants, and each family was limited to one home plus one vacation house. A year later, Law 989 of December 5, 1961, ordered the confiscation of all property belonging to those who left the country. For decades, the homes of emigrants were the regime’s main housing reserve.

1968: the war on the corner store

On March 13, 1968, from the steps of the University of Havana, Fidel Castro launched the Revolutionary Offensive. He asked the crowd whether they were going to build socialism or timbiriches, the Cuban word for tiny stalls, and declared: “There will be no future in this country for commerce, for self-employment, for private industry or for anything else.”

Figures published by the official newspaper Granma that March put the number of small businesses seized at 55,636, among them 11,878 grocery stores, 3,130 butcher shops, 3,198 bars, 8,101 food outlets and 6,653 laundries. Many were run by one or two people.

With them went the corner café, the sugarcane-juice stand, the shoemaker and the neighborhood repair shop. The former owners became state employees, and the quality of services collapsed.

1986: when the market worked, they shut it down

In May 1980, squeezed by shortages, the government allowed Free Peasant Markets, where farmers sold their surplus directly to the public. They multiplied within a few years, and food could be found again outside the ration book.

In 1986, Fidel Castro closed them under the so-called Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies campaign. Soon after, the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba entered the Special Period with no cushion at all.

What they are handing back: 1993 to 2026

Every time the economy hit bottom, those in power gave back a little room to the private property they had banned. Never out of conviction; always out of need.

In 1993, in the depths of the crisis, the government allowed self-employment again. In 1994 it reopened farmers’ markets with free prices, eight years after closing them. In November 2011, Decree-Law 288 took effect and finally let Cubans sell their homes before emigrating. In 2021 it legalized private small and medium-sized enterprises, known as mipymes.

What is happening in 2026, though, is on another scale.

The 176 measures

On June 12, Cuban ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel announced 176 economic measures. Within a week, the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the National Assembly, meeting in special session, had signed off on them. The Associated Press called it the biggest economic shift since the 1959 revolution.

The package opens the door to private banks, to direct investment by Cubans living abroad, to surface rights of up to 99 years for foreign capital and to land grants in usufruct for an indefinite period. It scraps the 100-employee cap on private companies, opens tourism and real estate in tourist areas to new investors and allows fast-food chains to set up on the island.

In the months that followed, those promises began turning into decrees. One of them lifted the acreage limit for farm cooperatives and gave mipymes, self-employed workers and foreign investors access to land.

A home can be bought and sold again

On October 14, exactly 66 years after the Urban Reform, Official Gazette No. 86 published Law 187/2026, the Housing Law, which took effect on October 21. It allows people to own up to two homes plus a vacation house, and it ends the confiscation of homes from those who leave the country.

The same law lets foreigners and Cubans living abroad acquire up to two homes, and it recognizes real estate as a business: investing in construction, selling, and leasing with an option to buy. By July 2024, according to the Ministry of Economy and Planning, the government had already approved more than 11,000 private mipymes.

The same state that in 1968 sneered at corner groceries as timbiriches now rents its trucks to private operators. None of this changes who is in charge.

Then and now, point by point

Markets yes, freedom no

The return of private property is economic, not political. Defending the 176 measures before the National Assembly, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said, according to the Spanish news agency EFE, that they do not alter the socialist nature of the system and are instead an “indispensable condition for its preservation.”

Put plainly: the market is coming back as a lifeline for the one-party state, not as a right for Cubans. The state still decides who opens a business, who imports and who gets the trucks. And whoever protests ends up in prison.

The NGO Prisoners Defenders closed September 2026 with 1,351 political prisoners, another record. It added 50 new cases that month and 318 over the past twelve, more than 26 a month. Among those held are 152 women and 476 sick prisoners who, according to the NGO, are denied medical care in whole or in part.

The same report documents the arrest of a pastor who had called for a public prayer for Cuba, the detention of believers during protests over water and power cuts, and the jailing of journalist Henry Constantín, director of La Hora de Cuba, in Camagüey since September 16. The organization also says every political prisoner on its list has been tortured. Since July 2021, 2,217 political prisoners have passed through the island’s prisons.

A month earlier, the count stood at 1,339. In October, the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights recorded 387 acts of repression.

The longest road

In 1968 the excuse was forging the “new man”; in 2026 it is saving the revolution. Both times the same leadership decides and the same people pay. They are back at square one without the middle class the Offensive crushed, with millions gone into exile and a generation raised in lines.

The ZIL trucks Azumat is offering to private operators are Soviet-era scrap the state can no longer keep running and needs someone else to put back on the road. The same goes for the whole economy. The difference now is that the country’s owners want to hold the keys to the market and the keys to the prisons at the same time.