From Prague to Hanoi, from Warsaw to Addis Ababa, the twentieth century bore witness to the same grim experiment repeated across continents: the centralisation of economic life, the suppression of prices, the abolition of private enterprise in the name of collective salvation. And in nearly every case, the experiment eventually ended, sometimes through the convulsions of revolution, sometimes through the quieter capitulation of reform.
The queues shortened; the lights came back on; the paperwork of survival gave way, slowly, to something resembling ordinary commerce. And Cuba? Well, Cuba alone remains: a living museum of twentieth-century ideology, where the exhibits still breathe and queue for bread. What was elsewhere a painful chapter has here become the entire book, its pages still being written in darkness.
In the evening hours across Santiago de Cuba or the neighbourhoods east of Havana, the situation is by now familiar: the sudden cessation of the electric fan, the hum of the refrigerator dying mid-cycle, the swift lighting of candles or kerosene lamps. Throughout 2026 (up to the present day), Cuba endured prolonged blackouts, at times lasting twenty hours or more in affected provinces: a stark manifestation not of temporary misfortune but of decay so deep it has become indistinguishable from the system itself.
On an average day, the Cuban government could meet only fifty to seventy per cent of the country’s electricity needs. The queue, for bread, for rice, for cooking oil, has become the organising principle of daily existence, the paperwork of survival in a republic where permission is required simply to live.
It was not always thus. Before 1959, Cuba laboured under the authoritarian rule of Fulgencio Batista, a regime no libertarian could defend, marked by corruption, political repression, and the suppression of democratic aspiration. Yet for all its moral failings, that order permitted the institutions upon which prosperity depends: private property, contract, enterprise, and the price system’s impersonal coordination of countless decisions.
The results were tangible. Cuba ranked among the most prosperous nations in Latin America, boasting the third-highest per capita income in the region, a substantial urban middle class, and indices of literacy and healthcare that rivalled many European countries. One need not romanticise the Batista years, nor excuse their injustices, to observe that the Revolution did not inherit a ruined country; it created one.
What followed 1959 was not the correction of economic backwardness, but the systematic dismantling of the very mechanisms that had produced relative abundance. The thesis of this essay is therefore plain: where property rights are insecure, where free enterprise is throttled, where speech is punished and association forbidden, the result is not equality but scarcity, not solidarity but corruption, not justice but flight. Cuba’s present agony is evidence – vivid, tragic, reproducible – of what collectivism reliably produces when stripped of the corrective mechanisms that only liberty can provide.
Consider the economic control mechanism: the systematic distortion of prices and the suppression of market signals. Price controls create shortages and, in the case of food, make it more likely people will go hungry. The libreta – the ration book introduced after 1959 – was meant to guarantee subsistence for all. Instead, the Cuban government has now acknowledged a crisis in the ration book, with shortages of basic products and failed distribution; without concrete solutions, the population faces further shortages and possible price increases.
When producers cannot charge prices that reflect real costs, they withdraw from the market or reduce quality; when consumers cannot pay freely, queues replace shelves. Black markets flourish, not as aberrations but as the only remaining channel through which supply can meet demand. The state, having abolished the price system, finds itself incapable of knowing what to produce, where to send it, or in what quantity.
The second mechanism concerns investment, productivity, and the treatment of private enterprise. Although micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) have grown steadily in recent years, they remain subject to limiting state regulation; their capacity to expand is hindered by lack of access to credit, a burdensome tax structure, and frequent shifts in Cuban economic policy. The government, wary of autonomous economic actors, has imposed new restrictions and blamed private businesses for inflation, a claim many economists dispute. Officials fear the private sector “because it’s autonomous, they make their own decisions, and they see that as a threat.”
Without secure property, without access to credit, without confidence that today’s enterprise will not be expropriated tomorrow, investment withers. The government confirmed that in 2024 the GDP declined again, marking two consecutive years of negative growth and contractions in four of the last six years; limited data through early 2025 indicate that macroeconomic imbalances and the production crisis persist. The rational response for any Cuban with talent and ambition is not to build but to leave.
Nonetheless, the collectivist defence deserves a fair hearing. Defenders point to Cuba’s achievements in healthcare and education, to its resistance to imperial pressure, to incremental reforms permitting limited private enterprise. Yet the evidence refutes the claim that the system delivers security. A USDA study found that an estimated 12.8 per cent of Cubans – 1.4 million people – did not meet the daily threshold of 2,100 calories in 2023; under adjusted GDP scenarios, that figure rises to 37.8 per cent. The regime was forced, for the first time in its history, to request powdered milk from the UN’s World Food Programme. What sovereignty is this, that cannot feed its children?
Beyond economics lies a moral psychology: what the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has called the architecture of exclusion. In his landmark study The Other Path, de Soto demonstrated how excessive bureaucracy and regulatory barriers force ordinary people into the informal economy, not by choice, but by the sheer impossibility of operating within the law. In 1980s Lima, his research team found that registering a small business legally required 289 days of navigating permits and paperwork; in Tampa, Florida, the same process took two hours. The implications are profound: when the state erects such barriers, it does not abolish enterprise; it merely drives it underground, stripping it of legal protection, access to credit, and the capacity to grow. “The poor are driven into these economic shadows,” de Soto observed, “by the heavy hand of the state and its bureaucracy.” Cuba presents the extreme case of this phenomenon.
To open a business, to travel, to publish, to assemble: each requires a licence, a stamp, a nod from authority. This is not merely bureaucratic inconvenience; it is the systematic subordination of the individual to the state. The citizen becomes a supplicant. Initiative is replaced by favour; rights become privileges dispensed at official discretion. Extralegal entrepreneurs, de Soto noted, “live in constant fear of government detection and extortion from corrupt officials,” forced to fragment their operations, unable to secure insurance or formal credit, reliant upon neighbours and local networks for the only protection available. In Cuba, informality, the exchange of favours, the reliance on remittances, the quiet barter in the grey economy, becomes the only space of genuine agency.
Neighbourhood networks, grassroots ingenuity, and community solidarity help families cope with shortages and uncertainties. These are admirable human qualities, but they flourish despite the system, not because of it. Real freedom survives only in the shadows, and a society that forces its citizens to live in shadows has forfeited any claim to justice.
What, then, would liberty require? Not utopia, but a sequence of concrete institutional reforms, each addressing a specific dysfunction. First, property: Cuba must establish a reliable property registry and cadastral system, without which no investor, domestic or foreign, can trust that ownership will be respected. The current absence of clear title records makes secure transactions nearly impossible and deters the long-term investment upon which growth depends. Second, enterprise: the bureaucratic labyrinth that presently governs business formation must be dismantled.
At present, opening a private enterprise requires multiple layers of authorisation, including approval by municipal councils whose criteria remain opaque; the rational alternative is a clerical determination, in which registration is granted automatically once objective legal requirements are satisfied. The list of prohibited activities, currently numbering over one hundred, should be replaced by a presumption of permission: whatever is not explicitly forbidden is allowed. Third, access to capital: Cuban entrepreneurs cannot, under current law, secure bank loans using their businesses as collateral; the introduction of genuine credit markets, including mortgage financing for housing and commercial lending for enterprise, would transform the investment landscape. Fourth, monetary stability: the 2021 currency unification triggered inflation that the government has never brought under control; a credible, independent monetary authority, insulated from fiscal pressures, is essential if savings are to retain value and contracts are to be meaningful. Fifth, the legal framework: private firms must be granted the status of legal persons, with the protections this entails: limited liability, enforceable contracts, access to courts, and the capacity to reorganise in bankruptcy. Sixth, and most difficult: the political conditions of liberty.
Freedom of speech, press, and association are not ornamental additions to economic reform; they are the mechanisms through which citizens hold power accountable and through which the state learns of its own errors. Until these conditions are met, every reform remains revocable at the stroke of a pen, and every entrepreneur operates under the shadow of confiscation. China and Vietnam, whatever their political defects, embedded market reforms in durable legal structures; Cuba has not. The path is known. The obstacle is not ignorance but power: a regime that fears autonomy more than it fears collapse.
Cuba’s darkened streets are not a mystery. They are the logical outcome of a system that suppresses prices, punishes initiative, silences dissent, and treats citizens as subjects rather than sovereign individuals. The remedy is not more control but less; not further concentration of power but its diffusion into the hands of ordinary Cubans. Until that permission is granted or seized – the republic will remain darkened.
