Cuban economy needs ‘urgent changes’ as US blockade deepens crisis, says president

Miguel Díaz-Canel cites China and Vietnam as possible models for opening up the country’s economy Cuba’s economy needs urgent changes to overcome a crisis intensified by a US oil blockade, the president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has said in a speech to Communist party leaders. “The situation calls for urgent and necessary changes,” Díaz-Canel told the party’s politburo in his frankest admission yet of the need to overhaul the country’s communist model. In the remarks, broadcast on Thursday, he cited China and Vietnam as possible models for opening Cuba’s economy to the world in order to “create economic wealth and distribute it equally”. Díaz-Canel made the remarks at a meeting called to fast-track changes aimed at boosting the growing private sector as the island, under pressure from Washington, undergoes an economic crisis. Some of the changes “will not have absolute consensus but cannot be postponed,” Díaz-Canel stressed. “When people’s lives become this hard,” he said, the Communist party and government had a responsibility to “change what needs to be changed” rather than try to explain away the crisis. The oil blockade imposed by Donald Trump in