New generation prepares to take over from Castro
HAVANA — Fidel and Raul Castro were scruffy young guerrillas in 1959 when they descended from Cuba’s eastern mountains, seized power and never relinquished it.
As they aged into their 80s and 90s, the Castros and their fellow fighters cast a shadow so deep that Cubans born in the first decades after the revolution became known as Cuba’s “lost generation,” men and women who spent their lives executing the orders of graying revolutionaries.
This week, Raul Castro will step down as president after a decade in office, handing the position to a successor widely expected to be 57-year-old Vice President Miguel Diaz Canel. The handoff on Thursday is the centerpiece of a broader transition to a group of leaders from the lost generation, who face an unprecedented test of their ability to guide a nation that has followed the same “commandantes” for 60 years.
Despite a series of reforms under Castro, Cuba remains locked in grinding economic stagnation that has driven hundreds of thousands to emigrate in search of better lives. Change will require potentially painful reforms, like the elimination of a dual currency system that has created damaging economic distortions.
“A great number of this country’s young people will be watching to see if they’re capable of changing things, of offering something new, of going beyond what’s seemed like a great grayness until now,” said Yassel Padron Kunakbaeva, 27, a blogger who writes frequently from what he describes as a Marxist, revolutionary perspective.
The world should expect no immediate radical change from a single-party system dedicated to stability above all else. Raul Castro will remain first secretary of the Communist Party, described by the Cuban constitution as the country’s “highest guiding force.” Castro has said nothing publicly about how he will use that position. But Cuban leaders have been making clear that a generational handover is under way.
Along with Diaz-Canel, a group of middle-aged leaders are being closely watched as candidates for more powerful positions. They include 60year-old Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, 54-year-old Havana party leader Mercedes Lopez Acea, 57-year-old economic reform czar Marino Murillo and 63-year-old Lazaro Exposito, party head in Cuba’s second most-populated province, Santiago.