End of Castro era sees new liberties and dire troubles
HAVANA — In 2008 Raul Castro took over a country where most people couldn’t own computers or cell phones, leave without permission, run most types of private businesses or enter resort hotels.
Castro set about re-engineering the system he had helped create and Cuba opened dramatically over his decade in office. But when Castro steps down this week after two terms as president, he will leave his successor a host of problems that are deeper than on the day his brother Fidel formally handed over power.
Cuban state media reported Monday that the government moved up the start of a meeting of the National Assembly in which Castro plans to resign. The session will now start Wednesday instead of Thursday.
Cuba has nearly 600,000 private entrepreneurs, more than 5 million cell phones, a bustling real estate market and one of the world’s fastestgrowing airports. Limited Internet use is expanding fast, with thousands of Cubans installing new home connections this year. Foreign debt has been paid. Tourism numbers have more than doubled since Castro and President Barack Obama re-established diplomatic relations in 2015, making Cuba a destination for nearly 5 million visitors a year, despite a plunge in relations under the Trump administration.
On the other side of the ledger, Cuba’s Soviet-style command economy still employs 3 of every 4 Cuban workers but produces little. Private-sector growth has been largely frozen. The average monthly state salary is $31 — so low that workers often live on stolen goods and handouts from relatives overseas. Foreign investment remains anemic. The island’s infrastructure is falling deeper into disrepair. The break with Washington dashed dreams of detente with the U.S. And after two decades of receiving Venezuelan subsidies totaling more than $6 billion a year, Cuba’s patron has collapsed economically with no replacement in the wings.
Castro’s inability or unwillingness to fix Cuba’s structural problems with deep and wide-ranging reforms has many wondering how a successor without Castro’s founding father credentials will manage the country over the next five or 10 years.
“People in Cuba really haven’t processed yet what it means to have a government without Raul or Fidel leading it,” said Yassel Padron Kunakbaeva, a blogger who writes frequently from what he describes as a revolutionary perspective. “We’re entering unknown territory.”
The greatest immediate challenge for Castro’s expected successor — 57-year-old Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez — is unwinding a byzantine dual-currency system featuring one type of Cuban peso worth 4 cents and another that is nearly a dollar. The system was designed to insulate a state-run, egalitarian internal market using “national money” from trade with the outside world denominated in “convertible pesos.”
Michael Weissenstein and Andrea Rodriguez are Associated Press writers.