Cuban President Meets Farmers on Implementing 176 Transformations

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel. Photo: Presidential Press Office.

September 15, 2026 Hour: 6:57 am

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel met Monday with representatives of the agricultural sector at the Convention Palace in Havana to discuss the implementation of the 176 economic and social transformations in the countryside.

Díaz-Canel, also first secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, said: “The country is built from the furrow.” He reaffirmed his full confidence that if there is a sector that must deliver results in the most immediate term, it is agricultural production. “We are now more aware that we can do better with all the possibilities offered by the transformations,” he said.

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He spoke of the sector’s potential, the characteristics of its people, and the willingness among farmers and workers in the state agricultural system. “This discussion is not only to think about the present, it is also for us to project ourselves toward the future,” he said.

The transformations, he noted, give producers the right to decide what is produced, how it is produced, in what quantities it is produced, and how it is marketed. “That gives you autonomy, but it also gives you tremendous responsibility, because if in the end the food does not appear on the plate of Cuban families, people will not believe in the transformations,” he stressed.

He recalled that other Cubans, from other sectors, will have to boost other transformations from which agricultural workers will also benefit. Those in the agricultural sector must assume themselves as “owners of the implementation of these transformations,” he said, adding that implementation can lead “to a different moment in the country’s agricultural development and therefore in food sovereignty.”

Díaz-Canel defined the 176 Economic and Social Transformations not as “a simple change of rules” but as “a change of logic.” It is “moving from being executors of plans to being managers of the productive destiny of food for the country,” he asserted.

“Today the land, inputs, marketing, financing, are closer than ever to you. The law opens doors, but those who go through the doors are the producers; the law alone does not solve; therefore, the call is for us to be ready for this challenge and to go out and seek a victory,” he said.

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