DÍAZ-CANEL
While he has ushered in some long-anticipated economic reforms, his tenure has been marked by the most crippling economic crisis on the island in decades, exacerbated by U.S. sanctions levied under former President Donald Trump. The crises have been unrelenting: a Cuban airliner crashed, killing 112 people, a tornado battered Havana, and the coronavirus pandemic strained the nation’s healthcare system. Authorities, meanwhile, continue to crack down on increasingly vocal critics who have staged several rare protests in Havana.
Now, as Cuba’s Communist Party Congress prepares to convene Friday and Raúl Castro plans to retire, many will be watching closely to see whether Díaz-Canel emerges from his predecessor’s shadow to chart his own path. DíazCanel has been walking a fine line, attempting to usher Cuba into some semblance of a 21st century economy while hewing to the one-party communist system that has ruled the island with an iron grip for over six decades.
But the turmoil of the last three years could pave the way for a shake-up.
“It gives him a foundation to make changes that would not have been made on a voluntary basis,” said John Kavulich, the president of the U.S.-Cuba
Trade and Economic Council. “Cuba tends to only make changes when it feels it has to, and then once it feels it has passed the problem, it then reverts back. The Díaz-Canel administration doesn’t have that luxury. There aren’t sugar daddies — meaning other countries — coming to its aid.”
Díaz-Canel’s rise to power has been years in the making.
He was named vice president of the country in
2013. That’s when Raúl Castro announced that he would vacate the presidency in 2018, handing over the reigns to DíazCanel, widely seen as a loyal bureaucrat. Raúl Castro held on to his title as first secretary of the party, a position considered more powerful than president. Díaz-Canel is considered a top contender for that post when Castro steps down.
Despite his long history in Cuban governance, Díaz-Canel was not widely known on the international stage.
A trained electrical engineer, he parlayed his time with the Union of Young Communists into becoming the party’s liaison to Nicaragua in 1987. The appointment was a big deal — Díaz-Canel was only in his mid-20s, and Nicaragua was seen as an important communist ally in Latin America.
From 1994 to 2003, he served as a regional party chief, first in Cuba’s Villa Clara province, and then in Holguin, a region on the island’s eastern side — posts in which he cultivated the image of a hard-working everyman who hosted a radio show and even supported rock festivals, art shows and a gay nightclub.
By 2013, years after Raúl Castro took over power from his ailing brother, Díaz-Canel was named vice president and the eventual successor to the presidency.
Kavulich said Díaz-Canel was the “perfect successor” to Raúl Castro.
“That’s because Miguel Díaz-Canel did not have a historical persona. He was, and remains, a bureaucrat, a technocrat, non-threatening, from a physical standpoint. He has begun the process of normalizing the role of the presidency in Cuba for the first time since prior to the revolution,” Kavulich said.
Optics certainly mattered. Throughout his vice presidency, he displayed the tact of a modern politician, glad-handing with world leaders on trips abroad and even U.S. Congressional leaders who visited the island after former U.S. President Barack Obama announced the normalization of relations between the countries.
Still, Díaz-Canel’s speeches never strayed from the usual Marxist jargon and revolutionary slogans. In 2017, a video leaked online showing Díaz-Canel, during a meeting of party officials, taking a hard-line stance, ripping dissidents and saying Cuba would not make any concessions to the United States.
“People saw him as young, energetic and openminded,” said William LeoGrande, an expert on Latin America and a professor
at American University. “Then, he gave that famous speech to a closeddoor meeting of party officials. People wondered if he was a hard-liner pretending to be a moderate, or a moderate trying to reassure hard-liners he won’t be Gorbachev.”
It’s a line that Díaz-Canel has continued to straddle, even when he assumed the presidency in April 2018, championing a theme of “continuity.”
“The generational change in our government should not give hope to the adversaries of the revolution,” he declared during a U.N. speech in September 2018. “We are continuity, not a rupture.”
By then, however, Cuba and the global stage were vastly different than even just a few years earlier.
More Cubans have access to the internet — and forums to lambaste Díaz-Canel and the government as the economy collapsed. When Díaz-Canel started his own Twitter account, he quoted Fidel Castro, saying “man needs something more than bread. He needs honesty. He needs dignity. He needs respect. He really needs to be treated like a human being. Is there any country that has done more for human rights than Cuba?”
The words drew mocking jabs from hundreds on social media; the post coincided with a shortage of bread across the island.
Just last week, Cubans armed with cellphones captured video that went viral showing a crowd in Havana loudly cursing Díaz-Canel after preventing the arrest of a rapper named Maykel Osogbo, who is a member of the San
Isidro protest movement.
“One of the new variables that Díaz-Canel has had to contend with is that internet access is available in a more massive way than what was happening prior to 2018,” said Michael Bustamante, a Cuba expert at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute. “Cubans on Twitter and meme culture allowed a new young generation to sort of constantly cast a critical eye on the state and in a sarcastic way at that.”
In turn, Diaz-Canel’s government has turned to familiar ways to stifle internal critics, jailing and fining independent journalists who have also found a wider audience in Cuba. Amnesty International last year condemned the censorship of reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.
Last fall, when a group of some 300 artists and activists mounted a rare public protest in Havana over civil liberties, the Díaz-Canel government mounted a publicity campaign to depict them as agents of the United States and antiCastro plotters in Miami.
“They have put on a media show for us. There is an unconventional-warfare strategy to try to overthrow the revolution,” Díaz-Canel said at a rally. “This is the last attempt by the Trumpistas and the anti-Cuban mafia. They had on their agenda that before the end of the year the Cuban revolution had to fall.”
Roberto Veiga, a Cuban political analyst and member of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, said the president is quick to cast general criticism as a conspiracy by
the Americans.
“In regards to the problem of artists and activists, Díaz-Canel is out of touch and incompetent,” he said. “Apparently, he doesn’t consider criticism as an essential component of politics.”
The economy, most experts say, will ultimately be Díaz-Canel’s biggest challenge if he takes over as party secretary.
Cuba’s economy is in its worst shape since the collapse of the Soviet Union, contracting 11% in 2020, according to government figures. Venezuela’s staggering economic collapse has diminished valuable oil shipments. Trump, reversing Obama’s policies, instituted a series of punishing economic sanctions designed to squeeze the Cuban government — including capping remittances that can be sent to families in Cuba.
“When people judge Díaz-Canel on his performance, it’s going to be on the performance on the economy,” LeoGrande said.
The pandemic has been a major factor in the country’s economic woes, although experts say DíazCanel’s government has largely managed the health crisis well compared to its neighbors.
“That they’ve done so under severe resource constraints aggravated by U.S. sanctions is notable. Cuba’s public-health infrastructure, resource-depleted as it is, has held up,” Bustamante said.
But the pandemic has shut down tourism, one of the country’s chief moneymakers. Cubans are waiting hours in line at state-run supermarkets with bare shelves.
On Jan. 1, Cuba unified its dual currency system, a measure meant to make the economy easier to navigate for much-needed foreign investors. But that hasn’t been good for average Cubans, yet.
“The stores changed to U.S. dollars. The prices of everything skyrocketed.
The task of ordering [goods] has been a total disaster, with officials saying one thing today and another completely different tomorrow,” said Verónica García, 56, who is a resident of Camaguey and called the island’s president a “puppet.”
In recent weeks, the island’s ministry of foreign trade and investment also announced it would be open to investments from Cuban Americans in a bid to help jump-start the economy. Last month, the Cuban government announced an expansion of small private businesses such as software programming, small-scale veterinarians and music teachers.
“He’s started reforms,” said Arturo Levy Lopez, a Cuba expert and professor at Holy Names University in Oakland, Calif. “His biggest problem is that he keeps defining his presidency as one of continuity.”
How quick Cuba’s outlook shifts will also depend on the pandemic, how soon tourists return and to what extent the Biden administration loosens sanctions, LeoGrande said.
“Biden promised to undue Trump’s sanctions that hurt Cuban families,” he said. “Remittances is on the top of that list. That’s literally billions of dollars a year.”
Cuba watchers will be reading the tea leaves, examining who gets promoted — and most importantly, who leaves the government — when the congress convenes. If Raúl Castro fully retires, as do other revolutionary government figures, it might open a space for Díaz-Canel to further reform the economy, analysts say.
Said Kavulich: “The best result for Miguel DíazCanel would be for Raúl Castro to take off his uniform, retire and enjoy his great grandchildren.”