Castro rule comes to an end in Cuba
Family led country for 60 years
A 57-YEAR-OLD bureaucrat took Raul Castro’s place as the president of Cuba yesterday.
The government in Cuba, one of the world’s last communist states, has been led by a single family for six decades.
Members of the National Assembly voted on Wednesday to back Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez’s nomination as the sole candidate for president.
The result wasn’t announced until yesterday morning, but the outcome was already clear, because the assembly approves all executive branch proposals by margins of 95% or higher.
The 86-year-old Castro will remain head of the Communist Party, which is designated by the constitution as “the superior guiding force of society and the state”. As a result, he will still be the most powerful person in Cuba for the time being.
His departure from the presidency is nonetheless a symbolically charged moment for a country that has been under the absolute rule of one family since the revolution – first by revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and, for the past decade, his younger brother.
Facing biological reality but still active and apparently healthy, Raul Castro stepped down as president in an effort to guarantee that new leaders can maintain the government’s grip on power in the face of economic stagnation, an ageing population and increasing disenchantment among younger generations.
“I like sticking with the ideas of President Fidel Castro because he did a lot for the people of Cuba, but we need rejuvenation, above all in the economy,” said Melissa Mederos, a 21-year-old schoolteacher.
“Diaz-Canel needs to work hard on the economy, because people need to live a little better.”
Most Cubans know their first vice-president as an uncharismatic figure who until recently maintained a public profile so low it was virtually non-existent. That image changed slightly this year as state media placed an increasing spotlight on Diaz-Canel’s public appearances, including remarks to the press last month that included his promise to make Cuba’s government more responsive to its people.
“We’re building a relationship between the government and the people,” he said after casting a ballot for members of the National Assembly.
Diaz-Canel gained prominence in central Villa Clara province as the top Communist Party official, a post equivalent to governor. People there describe him as a hard-working, modest-living technocrat dedicated to improving public services. He became higher education minister in 2009 before moving into the vice-presidency.
In a video of a Communist Party meeting inexplicably leaked to the public last year, Diaz-Canel expressed a series of orthodox positions that included a sombrepledge to curb some independent media and labelling some European embassies as outposts of foreign subversion.
But he has also defended academics and bloggers who became targets of hardliners, leading some to describe him a potential advocate for greater openness in a system intolerant of virtually any criticism or dissent. International observers and Cubans alike will be scrutinising every move he makes.
Two years after taking over from his ailing brother in 2006, Castro launched a series of reforms that expanded Cuba’s private sector to nearly 600 000 people and allowed citizens greater freedom to travel and access to information.
He has failed to fix the generally unproductive and highly subsidised state-run businesses that, along with a Soviet-model bureaucracy, employ three of every four Cubans. State salaries average $30 (R358) a month, leaving workers struggling to feed their families, and often dependent on corruption or remittances from relatives overseas.