Foreign Policy

Don't Let Sanctions Strangle Cuba's Transition To Markets

If the promised Cuban economic reforms are for real, the U.S. should step out of the way.

Matthew Petti | 6.26.2026 2:13 PM

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Here's a sentence no one expected to read: The government of Cuba is embracing the importance of markets and the business sector. Earlier this month, the state-run newspaper Granma announced 176 economic reforms that would legalize private banking, private business ownership, private real estate ownership, and the privatization of state-owned companies. It is an admission that Fidel Castro's communist experiments of the 1960s have failed.

"Cuba must not repeat the mistakes of the past, and must not depend, in economic matters, on any single product or any single country. Our country must seek an economic development path where we must inevitably diversify our economy, diversify the way we do business, and the way we project investments," Castro's great-nephew Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro told The National, a newspaper close to the government of the United Arab Emirates.

And the Trump administration has almost immediately moved to sabotage the reforms, imposing new sanctions on Cuba that will "throw more cold water on the foreign investors that are already there," a University of Miami professor told the Associated Press. The U.S. State Department condemned Cuba's reforms as "superficial smoke signals from the Cuban regime." That statement is a self-fulfilling prophecy: Scaring away foreign investors is a great way to make sure that reforms can't take root.

Whether communist or capitalist, Cuba has always needed foreign trading partners to survive as a small island without many resources. When Castro's revolution came into conflict with the United States........

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