In June 2026, Cuba's National Assembly did something unthinkable just a decade ago: it passed 176 sweeping free-market reforms, dismantling pillars of the revolutionary economy that had stood since 1959. Private banks were authorized. Real estate development was permitted. Foreign investors were allowed to take equity stakes in state-owned enterprises. "Elements that for decades were listed as pillars of the revolutionary economy," one political scientist observed, "have been dismantled". Cuba didn't embrace these reforms out of ideological conviction. It did so because its state-run economy was gasping—crippled by 20-hour daily blackouts, fuel shortages, and a collapsing power grid. The Castro regime's decades-long experiment with state control and expropriation had produced not equality, but impoverishment. The lesson is as old as it is unforgiving: expropriation doesn't eliminate inequality—it just replaces one elite with another while destroying ...