Transition to post-Castro era gets underway in Cuba

HAVANA — Cuba on Monday began a five-month political transition expected to end with Raul Castro’s departure from the presidency, capping his family’s neartotal dominance of the country’s political system for nearly 60 years.

Over the rest of this month, Cubans will meet in small groups to nominate municipal representatives, the first in a series of votes for local, provincial and, finally, national officials. Cuban officials say 12,515 blocklevel districts will nominate candidates for city council elections Oct. 22.

An opposition coalition says it expects 170 dissidents to seek nomination in the block-level meetings. A few opposition candidates have made it to that stage in previous elections but been defeated.

The government does not allow the participation of parties other than the ruling Communist Party and has worked to quash the election of individual opposition candidates, leading critics to call the elections an empty exercise meant to create the appearance of democratic participation.

Cuban officials say dissidents are paid by foreign governments and exile groups as part of a plan to overthrow the island’s socialist system and reinstall the capitalism and U.S. dominance ended by the country’s 1959 revolution.

In the second electoral stage, a commission dominated by government-linked organizations will pick all the candidates for elections to provincial assemblies and the National Assembly.

The National Assembly is expected to pick the president and members of the powerful Council of State by February. Castro has said he will leave the presidency by that date, but he is expected to remain head of the Communist Party, giving him power that may be equal to or greater than the new president’s.

Castro, 86, became president in 2008 and launched a series of slow-moving and limited socioeconomic reforms after his brother Fidel stepped down because of illness. Fidel Castro died last year at age 90.

First Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel, 57, has long been expected to be the next president. The career party official has kept a low public profile in recent years.

Many Cubans’ greatest exposure to him this year has been through an unusual video of the vice president speaking at a private Communist Party event, which was leaked to the public by an unknown culprit.

In it, Diaz-Canel discusses plans for crackdowns on independent media, entrepreneurs and opposition groups trying to win municipal positions.

The video may have been leaked by the government to telegraph that he will not accelerate the reform process started by Raul Castro, said Armando Chaguaceda, a Mexico-based Cuban political scientist.