The New Cuban Constitution and Private Enterprise

Jorge I. Dominguez, Ph.D., a former Harvard professor, has researched and written extensively about Latin American political and international affairs with an emphasis on Mexico and Cuba. At the start of 2019, Dr. Jorge Dominguez wrote an article titled “The good, the bad, and the weird in the 2019 Cuban Constitution” for the Cuba Posible website.

In the 2019 constitution, the country’s socialist economic system would open up options that would impact private enterprise. At the center of this change is recognizing the fundamental importance of private property and foreign investment. The revision stipulates that, while a property that belongs to people is governed by the country’s socialist system, the government legitimizes the role of private enterprise and other forms of business ownership that operate outside of the confines of state-owned entities, i.e., cooperatives and mixed enterprises.

This stipulation has opened up opportunities for private enterprise in the country. In 2020, Labor Minister Marta Elena Feito introduced a measure, which was approved by the Council of Ministers, that would remove limits on some private enterprises, limits that only allowed privately-owned business to operate in certain sectors of the state. Previous to this measure, only 127 industries were approved for private enterprise, but with the measure’s approval, this number has been increased to 2,000.