The Harvard Working Group on the Future of Cuba has published a report this month aimed at influencing the Trump administration’s policy approach toward the socialist tyranny. Yes, a working group dedicated to the island’s future, associated with that prestigious university, actually exists. And no — while the vast majority of its members are of Cuban origin, they are not part of the university itself (which was founded by Puritan Christians).

The Group’s work began in March 2026, weeks after President Donald Trump declared Castroism a threat to national security and the possibility of a military strike against the regime began to be seriously considered.

Cuban-American analyst Julio Shiling believes the report is part of a “public relations campaign to hoodwink the United States so that the Marines aren’t sent in and the dictatorship isn’t bombed — [hoping] that Trump leaves the White House and his successor doesn’t push the issue.”

Critical, Yet Apologetic toward Socialism

The project envisions the release of political prisoners, the restoration of civil liberties, private property rights, a social market economy, and a pluralistic democratic system. However, the document also conceives of a negotiated transition in which current Cuban authorities would play an initial role alongside the opposition, civil society, the diaspora, the United States, and the international community.

But why would those who currently hold a monopoly on political, military, and police power — as well as a significant share of economic power — voluntarily agree to dismantle the very system that guarantees that power?

Shiling criticizes the fact that the proposal for a future Constituent Assembly is deferred until current authorities position themselves as “facilitators” of the process. In his view, “the architects of the current disaster are being invited to design the architecture of the future. This is not democratization; it is co-optation.”

Furthermore, Shiling asserts that the report remains silent “on transitional justice, on accountability for 67 years of crimes against humanity, and on the need to dismantle the repressive bodies that have upheld the Castroist order. That silence is not an oversight; it is the document’s central political choice.”

According to the political analyst, the document treats the 2019 Castroist Constitution as a foundation rather than an obstacle — for instance, by urging the restoration of “rights” nominally present in the charter — and views it as a viable starting point. This is contradictory, given that the legal instrument was drafted to cement the Communist Party’s supremacy and provide “legal cover for the very practices the report claims to oppose.”

Moreover, the report’s language mirrors the rhetoric the Castroist leadership has employed for decades and, through omission, absolves socialism as the system responsible for the Cuban disaster.

The word “socialism” does not appear even once in the document. Instead of using more precise terms like “tyranny” or “dictatorship,” or even the more detached “regime,” the report clings to the word “government” — with its connotation of legitimacy — to refer to the military leadership in power.

Speaking of legitimacy, the text claims that Havana’s legitimacy “has deeply eroded.” But what legitimacy can be attributed, in the first place, to a group of rulers who have not held a free election in nearly seven decades?

To the authors of the material, Cuba-U.S. relations are “anchored in structural asymmetries that have forced Cuban authorities” to develop strategies for coexistence with Washington. In their view, “Fidel Castro responded to that reality through international alliances with the Soviet bloc during the Cold War or with the Bolivarian bloc at the beginning of the 21st century.”

In other words, at the root of it all, the United States caused the Cuban debacle. Castro found himself practically pushed into Sovietizing the island (after seizing property, and engaging in massacres and torture since 1959). In that sense, he is merely a — victim? — of historical forces and geopolitical pressures; not a man with agency who chose to enslave millions of human beings and export violence across much of the planet to serve his own ego and ideas.

At times, the document seems indistinguishable from an editorial in the state-owned newspaper Granma. See for yourself in the following excerpt: “Faced with the declared hostility of an American administration that has no qualms about implementing imperial-style policies toward its neighbors (…) it is necessary to develop new strategies. The current administration’s policies are explicitly imperial, yet their central objective is nothing new. Washington has sought ‘regime change’ in Havana since the 1960s and has maintained a trade embargo (what Cuban authorities call a ‘blockade’) against the island for decades.”

Diversity?

Together, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute and the Harvard Cuba Studies Program brought together scholars and intellectuals to “examine the crisis facing Cuba and develop recommendations to address it.” The website announcing the report describes it as a “living document, under construction” and notes that the Working Group will invite revisions “in a spirit of plurality and diversity.”

However, a preliminary look at the group’s 14 members reveals that the majority hold views within the contemporary political Left, ranging from logical opposition to Trump to an embrace of anti-capitalism.

One of the few U.S. citizens (without Cuban heritage) on the list of authors, Professor Steven Levitsky, urged voters in the Peruvian presidential election to support leftist candidate Roberto Sánchez in order to “combat the threat” allegedly posed by right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori.

It is curious that Levitsky — famous for his book “How Democracies Die” — opted for Sánchez. Sánchez not only supports former President Pedro Castillo — who was imprisoned for an attempted coup that nearly destroyed Peruvian democracy — but also looks favorably upon Venezuela and Cuba, regimes that dismantled their own democracies years ago. A case of necromantic selectivity?

Representing the Cuban side of the report is economist Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva.

During the summer, he was recruited by socialist dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel to join an advisory working group proposing socioeconomic “transformations” for present-day Cuba. This autumn, Everleny is part of the Harvard working group focused on the Cuba of tomorrow.

This seasonal shift should not be mistaken for a change in fundamental ideology. In neither role does the academic appear to question the continuation of socialism as the political framework; he merely advocates for a more open, market-oriented economy. Furthermore, he cites Vietnam and China as models — both centralized regimes that maintain repressive, single-party systems.

“Being a small island, lacking a product that sets global trends, blockaded by the USA — facing all those external factors you cannot change — you have to manage to change. And that change comes down to one word: market,” he said in a media outlet linked to the Castro regime’s political police. “Just as the Vietnamese did in ‘86: ‘We are going to build a country with a market economy.’ And the Chinese: ‘a socialist market economy.’”

Could this — including the use of the propagandistic term “blockade” — be what was whispered into Díaz-Canel’s ear in Havana? That “a comprehensive, Vietnam-style economic reform is needed,” and that “the Cuban government is moving too slowly”?

For political scientist Julio Shiling, although the Harvard Working Group presents itself as a sober academic exercise charting a path out of the national catastrophe, it actually offers a “plan for controlled continuity under a renewed dictatorial order.”

In a recent article, he warned that, “cloaked in the language of pluralism, gradualism, and pragmatic reform, the document functions less as a roadmap to democracy than as an intellectual justification for a Cuban variant of post-Soviet crony capitalism: the Putinist model with a tropical twist.”

Shiling added that the report does propose a transition, yes, but one “designed to preserve the institutional skeleton, personnel networks, and moral impunity of the current Cuban kleptocratic and sultanistic regime.”

The Cuban American Conservative Coalition questioned the report’s proposal for a “social market economy,” policies of equity and inclusion, affirmative action, and specialized entities to combat inequality. “Cuba must not move from communism to another form of state dependency,” it emphasized. “It must move from a controlling State to a citizenry of property owners.”

For the organization, the major question for the Cuban Right should not simply be “what to do with the regime?” but rather: “What kind of Cuba do we want to build after the regime?” And he added: “The visionary response would be to go further: not simply to rebuild the Cuba that existed before or to reform the revolutionary model, but to build a new Republic based on freedom, property, individual responsibility, private initiative, family, security, national sovereignty, and the rule of law.”