American Marconi Wireless News - Cuban economy needs 'urgent changes' to overcome crisis: president

"The situation calls for urgent and necessary changes," Diaz-Canel told the party's politburo in his frankest admission yet of the need for an overhaul of the country's communist model.

He cited China and Vietnam as possible models for opening Cuba's economy to the world in order to "create economic wealth and distribute it equally."

Diaz-Canel made the remarks at a meeting called to fast-track reforms aimed at boosting the growing private sector and attracting more capital from millions of Cubans who have fled the crisis abroad.

Some of the reforms "will not have absolute consensus but cannot be postponed," Diaz-Canel stressed.

"When people's lives become this hard," the Communist Party and government had a responsibility to "change what needs to be changed" rather than try to explain away the crisis, he said.

The oil blockade imposed by President Donald Trump in January has brought Cuba's already moribund economy to the brink of collapse, marked by power cuts sometimes lasting over 30 hours and shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.

While Havana's position has been to blame its woes on a more-than-six-decade US trade embargo and the blockade, Diaz-Canel admitted there were "obstacles that don't come from outside, nor the blockade."

He pointed to "slowness, bureaucracy and norms that impede those who want to produce" as well as "decisions that we have put off."

The reforms were widely seen as a desperate, eleventh-hour bid to stave off economic collapse.

It is unclear, however, whether they will satisfy Trump, who is pushing for a change in Cuba's leaders as well as its economic model.

P.Stevenson--AMWN