The Minister of Domestic Trade pleads for foreign investment to save a failing economy.
14ymedio, Havana, 4 April 2025 — For a long time, Cubans have not seen complete orders arriving without delay in the bodegas (ration stores), with no missing pounds or for only a part of the families. This was acknowledged in an interview with the State newspaper Granma by the Minister of Internal Trade, Betsy Díaz Velázquez, who explained that during 2024, the standard basket “decreased compared to the previous year.”
The minister did not provide specific data but admitted that “deliveries of resources from national production such as liquid milk were not made due to a collection deficit – which forced an adjustment of per capita to half a liter – for sugar, coffee, eggs, beef and salt. Eggs were distributed bimonthly in the first half of 2024, and from July only deliveries to pregnant women’s diets were achieved.”
In general, the official described last year as “extremely complex,” and this one, she added, “has started off equally challenging” with “serious damage to the standard family basket.” But she washed her hands of the situation. According to her, alleviating the lack of supply in Internal Trade requires titanic tasks in the context of the Cuban crisis, such as “increasing national production.”
The official described last year as “extremely complex,” and this one, she added, “has started off equally challenging.”
For the moment, her portfolio has only managed to “diversify the offers in the sector’s bodegas and centers, although nothing replaces what so regularly arrived every month to the bodegas.”
The official praised the collaboration of the private sector in a context where the State has its hands tied. However, she defended Resolution 56 of her ministry, which , since the end of 2024 limits wholesale trade for private companies and businessmen. While the former have until September to liquidate the goods they send to the wholesaler, the latter have been completely banned from activity since April.
Only production enterprises, whether private or non-agricultural cooperatives, will be able to sell wholesale as long as they market their own products and are subordinated to State-owned enterprises.
Asked whether the measure could become a “brake on the supply chain for the population,” Díaz said that Cuba will ensure that the rule works. However, she referred at all times to the private sector as a “complement” to the State enterprise system and stressed its utilitarian function: “Local storage capacities, equipment and other means are available in all territories but not exploited or underutilized, and they can be made available to non-State economic actors.”
“In all territories, local storage capacities, equipment and other means are available that are not being exploited”
The minister is speaking about the recent State custom of handing over equipment and facilities in precarious condition to individual entrepreneurs so that they are responsible for rescuing them and putting them to use.
Foreign investment, the only thing that could save the Island’s broken economy, was another of the issues that the official defined as priorities. Domestic Trade has approved eight foreign investment deals: an international economic partnership contract, five unnamed joint ventures and two wholly foreign-owned enterprises. Of these, five already operate in the wholesale market, and in 2024 they exceeded $20 million in sales.
“Foreign investment in the Domestic Trade system is intended to establish wholesale procurement markets that provide services to the State and non-State sector,” she said, adding that the priority is domestic industry.
Beyond the temporary lifeline represented, to some extent, by foreign capital, Díaz did not mention any concrete plan to stimulate food production and solve the supply problems that, in Granma’s words, “have already lasted longer than desired.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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