The multiple challenges, not least “an acute economic crisis and an adverse international context which have repercussions in the national economic and social sphere”, compels Cuba “to resort to creative resistance, strengthen local development and local productive systems, fundamentally those that do not depend on foreign currency, as well as develop the circular economy and stimulate innovation,” Head of State and Communist Party Leader Miguel Diaz–Canel told the Cuban people in a recent presentation that appeared designed to prepare the country for more tough times mostly on account of the island’s more than half a century’s old United States economic pressures.
More than five years after the death of the Caribbean island’s best-known leader, Fidel Castro, Diaz-Canel told Cubans that the country continues to endure problems largely due to the continued tightening of the U.S. blockade that accentuates Havana’s domestic challenges. A recent conversation between Diaz-Canel and the deputies of the country’s Economic Affairs Committee of the National Assembly of People’s Power, saw the country’s President detail the contradictions confronting Cuba even as the country sticks doggedly to its socialist model, stubbornly refusing to embrace a more liberal socio-economic system.
