Analysis: Cuban Communists under pressure to accelerate economic reforms

FILE PHOTO: A bicycle taxi passes by a parked vintage American car in Havana, Cuba January 18, 2016. Like many of its Caribbean neighbors, communist-governed Cuba imports more than two-thirds of its food, despite having rich farmland and hundreds of urban farms sprouting up in old parking lots, rooftops, or other small plots of unused land. REUTERS/Chris Arsenault/File Photo

HAVANA (Reuters) - Retiring Cuban Communist Party leader Raul Castro promised a decade ago he would transform the Soviet-style command economy into a more mixed and market-driven one "without haste and without pause."

Now, with the Caribbean country in crisis and even the most basic goods in short supply, the party is under pressure to act faster as it convenes this weekend for its eighth congress since the 1959 Revolution.