HAVANA (AP) — Cuba’s powerful Communist Party, or PCC, on Thursday approved an emergency economic package featuring unprecedented free-market measures aimed at opening up the struggling island’s economy amid heightened pressure from the U.S.The document, which has not yet been made public, will be submitted Thursday to Cuba’s National Assembly. It envisions expanding opportunities for private enterprise, greater autonomy for municipalities and state-owned companies and measures to attract additional foreign investment, including from Cubans abroad.In recent days, residents in several Havana neighborhoods staged protests, banging pots and pans as power outages spread across the island.“Cuba resists heroically and creatively, but has endured for too long a barbaric, undeserved and unbearable punishment, to which is now added the threat of military aggression,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel said late Wednesday in the closing speech of the Communist Party session. The speech was published Thursday.
Díaz-Canel said the emergency plan and the policy document prepared by the Communist Party’s Central Committee were shaped by the experiences of China and Vietnam, two communist countries that have introduced market-oriented economic reforms while maintaining one-party rule.
