HAVANA -- Cuba announced a new credit system Thursday that will offer loans to small-business owners, independent farmers, and other citizens beginning next month, advancing promised reforms to the country’s state-planned economy.

Credit will also be available to people looking to purchase building materials, pay for labor associated with home construction, “acquire goods for their personal property or satisfy other needs,” according to the government’s Official Gazette.

The lack of a lending system has been one of the chief complaints of the expanding class of entrepreneurs running independent businesses as part of President Raul Castro’s economic overhaul, which aims to right Cuba’s foundering economy and has picked up steam since a landmark Communist Party summit in April.

Economists have also said credit is necessary if private businesses are to grow beyond subsistence levels.

“The new credit policy is another step toward the configuration of a mixed economy integrating state and non-state sectors in a common national market,” said Arturo Lopez-Levy, a Cuban-born economist at the University of Denver. “This is a significant departure from the partially reversed changes of the 1990s, when the archconservative 5th Communist Party Congress conceived the non-state sector as walled off from business activity.”

The island government also established rules for paying private contractors who do business with the state.

Offering loans for home construction could help address the island’s acute housing shortage and bolster Cuba’s brand-new real estate market, created earlier this month when property sales were legalized for the first time since shortly after the 1959 revolution.