Cuba’s new president decades in the making
On the eve of the anniversary of Cuban patriot José Martí’s birth, Raúl Castro, flanked by members of the revolutionary old guard and a much younger man who hadn’t even been born at the time of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, led a torchlight parade from the University of Havana.
While the younger man, Miguel Díaz-Canel, stepped briskly along during the late January parade, the octogenarians walked gingerly and haltingly, graphically illustrating Cuba’s coming generational shift in power.
Now Díaz-Canel is the man Cuba’s National Assembly has selected as the new president and the face of the island’s future.
He has been waiting in the wings since 2013, when Castro said that he would leave the Cuban presidency on Feb. 24, 2018 — later postponed to April 19 — and the rubber-stamp National Assembly named Díaz-Canel first vice president of the Council of State.
“When Raúl Castro is the president, then yes, the president runs Cuba,” said Jaime Suchliki, a longtime Cuba watcher. “When Raúl Castro is not president, that will be a very different matter. DíazCanel has no tanks and no troops.”
Virtually everyone who tries to read the smoke signals from within Cuba’s hermetically sealed political institutions agrees that big change is coming at the hands of the revolutionaries’ most inexorable opposition — the passage of time. The men who helped seize control of the island more than half a century ago and keep the regime firmly in place are now well into their 80s, many either dead like Raúl’s older brother, Fidel, or sidelined by age.
“Maybe the idea to put some separation between the party and the state will start to have legs. They have been talking about this concept for a long time, but it is very difficult to separate the two in a Communist system,” said Feinberg, the political economist from California.
Díaz-Canel himself has solid party credentials. In 1997, he became the youngest member ever of the Politburo, the handpicked committee of 14 party members who function as Castro’s senior advisers.
Yet if there’s still doubt about how much real power Castro is willing to cede, there’s a widespread consensus that the political and economic collapse of the government in Venezuela — Cuba’s staunch ally and longtime subsidies provider — means that the island must seek foreign investment and engage with other governments. And that, in return, will require at least some public-relations gestures to convince the outside world that Cuba is moving beyond a onefamily state.
Díaz-Canel represents youth within a leadership of elders.
Díaz-Canel dresses in jeans and guayaberas, not military fatigues. He carries a tablet computer and has a Facebook account, though posts appear to be managed through official channels.
“We’re talking about a generational succession, not a simple succession,” said Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban diplomat and academic who lives in Havana.
The Castro brothers made tentative stabs at establishing a younger generation of leaders before, but they always pulled back. Economic whiz Carlos Lage and a pair of foreign ministers — Felipe Pérez Roque and Roberto Robaina — were all once thought to be heirs to the Cuban leadership, but each was discarded for showing signs of unseemly ambition.
Díaz-Canel, an electrical engineer by training and a career bureaucrat, has been careful to avoid those snares. He forged strong bonds with the Castros during a youthful stint in military service that — according to a former military man who served in a similar unit — included time in a detachment that provided personal security to Fidel and Raúl.
“The key to his success ... is his congeniality with the ruling class,” said a Cuban exile who once worked closely with Díaz-Canel, adding that both Castros “liked him.”
Díaz-Canel soon received a series of key appointments in both the government and the Communist Party. After making his mark in the Union of Young Communists, the party’s youth league, he was only in his mid-20s when he was appointed the party’s liaison to Nicaragua — then communist-ruled and Cuba’s key ally in the Western Hemisphere — in 1987.
Since then his career has alternated between senior managerial posts, including minister of higher education, and increasingly important party jobs. From 1994 to 2003, he was one of a small, influential group of regional party chiefs, first in central Cuba’s Villa Clara province and then in Holguín province in the country’s east.
“They [the provincial party secretaries] are virtual czars at the level of the provinces but they don’t have that much exposure to western media,” said Arturo López Levy, a former analyst with Cuban intelligence who now lives in the United States. “These provincial party czars are major players in the evolving new political system that’s more pluralistic, if not more democratic. … He stood out among the party czars.”
Unlike some of the Communist Party’s technocratic jobs, the provincial czars are very much in the public eye, at least locally, and Díaz-Canel was a popular figure within his fiefdoms. His work ethic was much admired — “he had a great physical and mental endurance,” remembers a close associate from that period. He recalled Díaz-Canel’s regular 18-hour days on the job — and his informality as a welcome change from the rigidity of the Cuban bureaucracy.
“He liked to talk to the common people,” recalled a former colleague.
He sometimes popped into local bars to share a beer and a joke.
During recent elections, while most high-ranking Cuban officials zipped in and out of polling places, Díaz-Canel waited in line with everyone else to cast his ballot for a governmentapproved slate of National Assembly candidates. He even answered reporters’ questions.
Once, when an electrical blackout darkened the province’s hospital, DíazCanel spearheaded the repair party and went from bed to bed apologizing to patients — including the astonished Cuban dissident Guillermo Fariñas, who was hospitalized on a hunger strike against the government. “He said hello and asked about my health,” the bemused Fariñas recalled.
The citizens Díaz-Canel liked to chat up certainly included women. Sometimes referred to by both men and women as el lindo, the cutie, Díaz-Canel is consistently described by acquaintances as “lucky” in romance. At some point, he married Liz Cuesta, a tourism official, who is frequently photographed with him at official events — a notable change from the treatment of Fidel Castro’s marriage, which was practically a state secret during his decades in power.
To his admirers, DíazCanel’s comparative youth amplified what were otherwise relatively minor deviations from Cuban political orthodoxy. “He followed the party line,” remembers someone who worked with him then. “But he had an open mind because he is younger. He said sometimes changes within the system were needed, from the press to production. We always talked about changes in the press.”
Díaz-Canel, in fact, is an avid reader of the country’s tightly controlled newspapers. He often invited reporters along on his trips into the countryside and sometimes called them with story suggestions. In Villa Clara, he even hosted a radio show. His interest extended beyond journalism to the arts; he promoted rock festivals and art shows when many party officials still regarded such events as degenerate and possibly subversive.
But he was also careful to keep his patrons satisfied. Once, when Fidel announced early in the morning that he was making a surprise visit to the city of Santa Clara, Díaz-Canel was able to fill the city’s Revolutionary Square with cheering throngs by the time the leader arrived in the afternoon.
Díaz-Canel has continued his adroit footwork since his appointment as Cuba’s top vice president in 2013. His speeches, laden with Marxist jargon and revolutionary slogans, rarely break new ground. Even his cautious criticism of government press censorship — “secretismo,” he has called it — wasn’t made until Raúl Castro raised the same subject. His speeches inevitably contain frequent praise of the Castros. In a 2014 speech in Mexico City, he managed to mention the longtime rulers five times.
Veteran Cuban analysts are impressed with the deft way Díaz-Canel has juggled all these political and ideological balls. “DíazCanel has played his cards very well,” said former diplomat Alzugaray. “He’s been low-key but influential.” .” Placating the military might turn out to be the biggest part of Díaz-Canel’s job. “He will be a puppet,” said Antonio Rodiles, a Cuban dissident and human rights activist. “The power is in the military forces.”