Retiring Raul Castro brings concerns to Communist Party
This week’s Communist Party congress could be the last with a Castro at the helm of Cuba’s all-powerful political institution.
Six years after the death of Fidel Castro, his brother and fellow leader of the island’s 1959 revolution, Raul Castro, is being watched to see if he fulfills his commitment to give up the reins of the only political organization permitted in the country of 11 million people.
Raul Castro in 2016 said that he would give up the post of party secretary-general at the party’s eighth congress, which is scheduled to begin today. Standing down would complete the move to turn control over to a younger generation of revolutionaries led by Miguel Díaz-Canel, who took over the presidency from Castro in 2018.
Many Cubans are anxious over the change after having their daily affairs guided for more than six decades by a Castro, and Raul Castro’s expected exit from the political scene couldn’t come at a more difficult time.
The coronavirus pandemic, painful financial reforms and restrictions reimposed by the Trump administration have again brought food lines and shortages reminiscent of the “special period” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. But unlike past crisis that brought Cubans together,
concern is on the rise, fueled by the spread of the Internet and growing inequality that has laid bare the socialist system’s failings.
“We’ve lost an entire decade,” said Alina Lopez, a Havana historian who runs a blog that is a forum for leftist criticism of the government. “They don’t how to bring real change because any change must start with a lot of self-critique.”
At the previous Communist Party congress, in 2016, Castro announced that owing to the “inexorable laws of life,” he would step down as first secretary-general of the Communist Party in 2021 and yield power to Diaz-Canel.
Also expected to resign at the gathering is Castro’s deputy, 90-year-old José Ramón Machado.
That would potentially leave the 17-member Politburo for the first time without any veterans of the guerrilla insurgency, or what many Cubans affectionately refer to as the “historic generation.”
William LeoGrande, an American University expert on Cuba, said such an outcome could greatly enhance Diaz-Canel’s ability to push through overdue reforms as part of a broader economic opening approved a decade ago.
In January, Diaz-Canel finally pulled the trigger on a plan approved two congresses ago to unify the island’s dual currency system, giving rise to fears of inflation.
After the economy contracted 11% last year, he also threw the doors open to a broader range of private enterprise that had been stamped out by state planning, permitting Cubans to legally operate almost any self-run businesses from their homes.
But authorities have yet to tackle what LeoGrande considers the elephant in the room — an overhaul of the bloated state-run companies and government agencies on which the vast majority of Cubans depend for their meager salaries and subsistence.