After 62 years of revolution, the last Castro exits
Raul Castro, the ruler of Cuba, is doing what Fidel Castro once claimed that true revolutionaries never do. Aged 89, he is retiring. Cuba will be without a Castro in a formal government position for the first time in 62 years.
The stage for his departure is the eighth congress of the country’s Communist Party, held behind closed doors in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolucion. To remind passers-by that the change of the guard does not mean that the revolution is over, buildings in the area have been plastered with the word ‘‘continuity’’.
Castro will step down as first secretary of the party, a position he has held since 2011.
His successor, as it was when he resigned from the presidency three years ago, will be his protege, Miguel Diaz-Canel, 60.
The historic handover marks the end of a seven-decade political and military career for General Castro. Five years Fidel Castro’s junior and lacking his sibling’s stature and ego, for most of his adult life Raul played the role of discreet assessor to the maverick, disorganised and brilliantly persuasive brother.
In 1953 Raul followed Fidel in what turned out to be a madcap false start of a revolution, when they attacked a military barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba. Both were imprisoned for nearly two years, before heading for exile in Mexico.
There, Raul was the first of the Castros to meet Ernesto ‘‘Che’’ Guevara and recruit him to the cause.
Returning to Cuba by boat in 1956, the younger brother became one of the key military commanders in the guerrilla campaign to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
After the revolution triumphed in 1959, Castro gained a reputation as ‘‘Raul the terrible’’.
He oversaw dozens of executions, and some killings without trial, of loyalists to the ousted Batista. He then helped to establish the revolutionary army and set up its KGB-style Ministry of the Interior.
Travelling often to meet President Nikita Khrushchev, who would entertain him at his dacha, Raul Castro became a crucial link with the Soviet Union, a vital financial benefactor for the island for three decades.
When he formally took over as president from his ailing brother in 2008, Raul Castro moved to undo some of the laws that he saw as unnecessary, including allowing Cubans to buy their own homes and cars.
He backed months of secret talks to reinstate diplomatic relations with the US, sending his son Alejandro, an army colonel, as his representative.
That culminated in President Barack Obama’s historic threeday visit to the island in 2016.