Cuba’s Council of Ministers proposes reducing the number of state entities from 27 to 21, although it has not yet revealed which ones will disappear or be merged.
14ymedio, Havana, Alejandro de Cañas, 10 May 2026 / The Cuban government has decided to downsize its own machinery, though instead of a chainsaw it is using garden shears. The Council of Ministers approved a draft bill to reduce the number of agencies in the Central State Administration from 27 to 21, a pruning of six entities in a country where bureaucracy has grown for decades at the same pace as inefficiency. The measure is not yet in effect; it must still be approved by the National Assembly, but it already marks the first concrete step in a restructuring announced weeks ago.
The news was published on May 9 in Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party. The article does not identify which agencies will disappear, be absorbed, or be merged—a significant omission in a reform presented as a fundamental redesign of the state apparatus.
In presenting the proposal, legal expert Andry Matilla Correa stated that “this is not merely a structural change, but rather a redesign of each of the Bodies of the Central State Administration (OACE).” Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz was even more direct: “A small country, a country with such a complex situation, cannot have such a large structure, so much bureaucracy, which makes processes inefficient, and therefore requires a different design.”
For a country with fewer than ten million inhabitants, the structure seems bloated even when compared to governments of larger countries.
The decision didn’t come out of nowhere. In April, Miguel Díaz-Canel had already announced that the regime was preparing a “restructuring” of the state apparatus. In an interview with RT, the president stated: “We are also considering a restructuring of the entire state, administrative, and business apparatus; that is, reducing bureaucracy. This isn’t just about the structures themselves, because even a small structure can be bureaucratic. We have to work in both directions.” He also announced the goal of achieving “fewer continue reading
That April announcement also had a regulatory precedent. On the 9th of that month, Decree 127 on budgeted institutions was published, officially presented as a regulation intended to “resize the Central State Administration,” improve its structures, and reduce the administrative burden on the public budget. In other words, before the proposed figure of 21 agencies was known, the Government had already begun to prepare the legal and rhetorical groundwork for streamlining its apparatus.
The reform is late, but not for lack of signals. Cuba currently maintains 22 ministries and five non-ministerial agencies within the 27 existing State Administrative Bodies (OACE), according to the institutional list published by the Presidency. For a country with fewer than ten million inhabitants, an impoverished economy, a chronic shortage of foreign currency, and deteriorating public services, the structure seems bloated, even when compared to the governments of larger countries.
If we consider only the number of ministries, Cuba has 22, the same number as Spain and more than Mexico, with 21 state secretariats; Colombia, with 19 ministries; and Argentina, which, after Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” reshuffle, reduced its cabinet to eight ministries. There is no standardized global ranking , because each country classifies its portfolios and agencies differently, but Cuba clearly ranks among the top countries when compared to several leading governments in Latin America.
The big question is which six organs will be affected.
For years, the Cuban regime presented itself as a model of rational planning, but it has maintained a cumbersome, fragmented, and costly state architecture inherited from the former Soviet Union. Even the official press now admits that this structure hinders processes and multiplies bureaucracy. This acknowledgment comes as the Cuban economy is experiencing one of its worst crises in decades, with blackouts, inflation, declining productivity, and a state increasingly unable to guarantee basic necessities.
The great unknown is which six agencies will be affected. Officially, this hasn’t been announced yet. Granma only reported the total reduction from 27 to 21. Logically, the possible candidates include the Institute of Information and Social Communication, which could be integrated into the Ministry of Communications; the National Institute of Territorial Planning and Urbanism, which could be absorbed by the Ministry of Construction; and the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources, which could be transferred to the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Environment.
Among the ministries, the mergers that would make the most administrative sense would be Education with Higher Education, Industries with the Food Industry, or, more debatable, Domestic Trade with Foreign Trade and Investment. For now, all of this remains in the realm of conjecture, not a published decision.
The announced reduction may be a sign of belated rationality or merely a cosmetic operation. The decisive factor will not be how many titles disappear from the organizational charts, but how many procedures, layers of command, and spaces of irresponsibility and corruption disappear with them.
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