After six years, the 9th Congress of the Association of Economists and Accountants (ANEC) began this Thursday amid an extraordinarily tense economic situation in Cuba.

As June approaches, the Cuban crisis is deepening and the details of the government program “to combat distortions and boost the economy” remain unknown. Who is responsible?

To ensure that tourism truly becomes one of the driving forces of the national economy, much more than wishful thinking is required.

We’ve loaded ourselves with measures and regulations, laws and decree laws, ministerial resolutions, circulars, guidelines....

Marabú charcoal has become a highly prized commodity because, in addition to being exportable, it is now an essential resource for cooking food in many Cuban homes due to the lack of electricity and liquefied gas.

If GDP growth depends on export revenues, we should conclude that there is a real possibility that we will not reach the forecasted 1%.

It is imperative to find new products and review the applied incentives and regulatory framework.

If we have defined objectives, indicators, goals and deadlines, what should happen is that the program be made public, so that the people can also contribute to enrich it and assess its fulfillment in detail.

Without growth, there will be no possible development, no reduction in poverty, no improvement in equity.

The short term is so decisive that it becomes the priority for everyone, rulers and governed, because as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long term we will all be dead.

Why continue to insist on doing what doesn’t work?

The loss of trust and its correlate, uncertainty, destroys positive incentives and encourages neglect, individual solutions, among them, geographical and work-related emigration.

It is not for lack of books and research that the people’s enterprises do not achieve what they should be and fail to start the big engine that pulls the rest of the Cuban business system.

Indecision, incoherence, unfulfilled promises are some of the worst diseases a government can suffer from.

Two international contexts place Cuba in a new scenario: on the one hand, its recent inclusion as a partner in the BRICS, and on the other, the upcoming elections in the United States.

From the 1980s to date, Cuba has not achieved a positive balance of goods in any year.

With only three months to go, we already know that this year will not see the essential take-off of the Cuban economy.

These enterprises have been useful in sharing the blame for the problems in the Cuban economy, just as hurricanes or droughts have sometimes done.

It is insisted that this is not a war against SMEs; however, the measures announced and admitted by those who claim it indicate the opposite.

We will enter the second half of 2024 with policies that limit and hinder the growth of the country’s business fabric.

If the labor pains to get the MSMEs to be born in Cuba were intense, it seems that the postpartum pains are just as acute.

Runaway inflation affects everyone, but fundamentally those with lower incomes, retirees, pensioners and a great many wage earners.

When today we debate the different actors in our economy, the experience of the Open Farmers’ Market and the Agricultural Markets of the 1990s helps us understand what we should not do.

Do we Cubans actually live in a war economy? There are facts that indicate otherwise.