Spain has kept Cuba’s communist Government afloat with nearly €5 billion in debt write-offs and aid, most of it granted under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, a report has estimated.
The Juan de Mariana Institute, a Spanish free-market think tank, released its study, The Price of Sustaining Castroism, to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the mass anti-government protests of July 11, 2021.
Its central charge is that successive Spanish governments, of both left and right, have repeatedly eased Havana’s debts without demanding democratic reforms in return.
The institute described a one-party state responsible for tens of thousands of deaths linked to state repression and still holding more than 1,000 political prisoners across some 300 detention centres.
The starting point was a 2016 agreement that restructured €2.444 billion of Cuban debt to Spain. Madrid forgave about 60 per cent of that sum outright, roughly €1.492 billion, and set an 18-year repayment schedule for the remainder.
Cuba missed those deadlines too, the report said. In July 2025 the Spanish Government launched a debt-conversion programme worth up to €375 million, letting Havana spend the money on agreed projects rather than repay it.
A further restructuring of trade-finance credits followed, valued by the institute at €291 million. Taken together, the study said, the measures have written off close to 90 per cent of Cuba’s obligations, leaving a balance of about €286 million.
The report put the effective cost higher still. Had Cuba borrowed on normal market terms, its debt would have reached €5.28 billion by 2026, making the true value of Spanish relief close to €4.994 billion.
The institute set that generosity against the treatment of Spanish firms on the island. More than 150 companies are owed some €255 million in unpaid bills, a figure that climbs to €318 million once blocked dividends are counted, with several pushed into insolvency.
The study also criticised the European Union, whose funding for Cuba rose from about €50 million in the 2014-2020 budget to €125 million for 2021-2027. It argued the increase came despite mounting repression and Havana’s closer alignment with Russia.
The report cited the European Court of Auditors as having flagged weak oversight of EU cooperation spending, warning that the final destination of such money was often impossible to trace.
The Juan de Mariana Institute concluded that Spain had not underwritten a democratic transition in Cuba but had helped lower the cost of the dictatorship’s survival.
