- The latest ECLAC report predicts that the economy of the island will remain negative for at least two years.
- The agency believes that between 2025 and 2035, Cuba will be among the countries with sufficient per capita gross national income to be left without these funds.
14ymedio, Madrid, August 6, 2025 — At least two years of suffering remain for the Cuban economy. According to the latest report of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Cuba’s gross domestic product (GDP) will fall in 2025 by 1.5%, more than in the previous year (-1.1%), remaining alone in this situation of decline. Its only companion is neighboring Haiti, whose GDP will decline by 2.3%, although in its case there is an improvement, since last year it declined by 4.2%.
For 2026 the forecasts are less gloomy, as Cuba will remain negative, but only by 0.1%.
Despite this, the ECLAC report contains relatively positive medium-term data, although with uncertain results. Cuba is in the group of future graduates, a block of countries that will move to the category of high “per capita gross national income,”which in practice means leaving the list of those eligible for Official Development Assistance (ODA). In other words, if this forecast is maintained, Cuba may lose one of its major sources of financing.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) considers that countries which have maintained a high-income status for three consecutive years, pre-defined on an annual basis and now very close to $14,000, can “graduate,” and that the Island will do so between 2025 and 2035.
OECD allocates, through its Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the funds provided by donor countries based on per capita gross national income.
The OECD allocates, through its Development Assistance Committee (DAC), donor funds based on the per capita gross national income as established by the World Bank and the United Nations. As the report published this Tuesday mentions, several countries in the region have graduated in previous years, and by 2026 Panama and Guyana are expected to graduate. “The OECD (2014, 2024) estimates that between 2025 and 2035, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname could also graduate,” states the document.
“In the last decade, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia and Haiti have been the main recipients of ODA, measured in dollars, which underlines the importance of these flows and the challenges that their possible loss after graduation entails,” warns the ECLAC, which draws ambivalent conclusions from this situation. While, in their view, graduation represents evidence of economic progress, “it also implies the loss of access to concessional financing that may be difficult to replace with alternative sources, which often have stricter conditions.”
In the case of Cuba, in particular, its access to other types of loans is mostly closed due to its withdrawal from international organizations such as the Monetary Fund, the U.S. sanctions and the very low rating of its debt.
ECLAC places the ODA as one of the largest funds, with disbursements of about $119,096 million between 2013 and 2023, compared to $50,296 from the World Bank. For this reason, the Commission offers some recommendations in view of the possible graduation of so many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it asks that GDP per capita should no longer be considered as a criterion “because it does not reflect the complexity of development needs. It also recommends the adoption of smoother transitions for newly graduated countries.
The macroeconomic development of Cuba does not suggest that it can be part of a list of countries with high per capita gross national income.
The macroeconomic development of Cuba does not suggest that it could be part of a list of countries with high per capita gross national income. The latest data were obtained in 2019, when the last crisis had not yet arrived, and stood at $7,593.35, far from the $13,845 that the DAC considers “high” for the period 2024-25. However, it should be noted that the current classification of the island is intermediate-high, aimed at those above $4,496, according to the World Bank.
The ECLAC report, moreover, places Cuba once again as a country with chronic inflation, and it is one of the countries excluded from calculating the regional average. Argentina, Haiti, Suriname and Venezuela accompany the island in this case. Their inflation numbers are so persistently high that they would artificially deform the whole. While Latin America and the Caribbean have an average of 4.3% inflation and a median of 2.9%, which is much better than in 2022, when it was above 8%, Cuba has reached 24.9%. Only Haiti (28.7) and Argentina (122.1%) are worse off.
Cuba has greatly improved this indicator, at least officially, as it was 39.1% in 2022 and 31.3% in 2023. However, inflation figures above double digits are very dangerous and have two aggravating factors in this case: the first is that in the informal market, which must be constantly resorted to to obtain goods otherwise impossible to find, it is much greater. The second is that, as some Cuban economists point out, the decline in this figure has been achieved by the contraction of the population’s purchasing power and not because there is more production that reduces prices.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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