John Caulfield, The Hill

As the Trump administration rewrites the rules on Cuba’s economic sanctions, President Raul Castro and other senior officials addressed Cuba’s National Assembly on the economic challenges their country faces. Castro reviewed progress on the “lineamientos,” or guidelines on Cuban economic reforms he launched after he was elected president in 2010. The guidelines are a document of the Cuban Communist Party proposed by himself and other top party leaders to rescue the Cuban economy from the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy imposed by former president Fidel Castro that replicated the economic system of the former Soviet Union.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of its subsidies to Cuba, the failure of that model became apparent. The election of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998 brought a new patron and delayed the inevitable abandonment of the Soviet model. As Venezuela endures its own crisis, it has cut oil shipments in half and abandoned economic joint ventures between the two countries.