Cuban communists debate party overhaul
Cuba’s Communist Party opened an unprecedented two-day conference here Saturday to press for a “change of mentality” in the country’s single-party political system to match efforts to reform the economy.
More than 800 delegates to the special conference have been given the task of overhauling a party that has ruled the island uncontested for 50 years but faces growing pressure to change its ways.
“There is no ideology without economy,” the Communist Party newspaper Granma declared Saturday, setting the tone for the push to put the party in sync with a gradual opening of the 90-per cent state-run economy to private initiative.
The newspaper stressed that President Raul Castro’s top priority is to overcome the party’s attachment to “obsolete dogmas and criteria,” which Granma likened to a psychological barrier.
Not up for discussion, however, is the Communist Party’s monopoly on power or its Marxist-leninist principles.
The conclave is supposed to make decisions on nearly 100 proposals, including calls to open party leadership to more youths, women and blacks and to allow gays to serve openly in government, the party and the military.
“Yes, we are pushing for rights; and we have to include them in every way,” as “their sexual orientation has nothing to do with their ideological or party identity,” said Mariela Castro, a daughter of Raul Cas- tro, who leads the National Centre for Sex Education.
The new embrace of gays comes a full two decades after the government dropped its policy of official atheism and accepted religious believers into its ranks.
Castro also has called for a 10-year term limit for the presidency and the party leadership, as well as other high offices — a huge change in a country ruled by his brother, revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, for nearly 50 years.
Raul Castro, 80, became president in 2008 after Fidel became ill, and only last year assumed the leadership of the Communist Party from his brother, who is 85.
The younger Castro has expressed “shame” that a new generation of Cubans has not been prepared to take over from the old guard of revolutionary leaders, now near the end of their lives.
Of 15 Politburo members selected at the last party Congress, only three were under the age of 65.
The conference has the power to make changes to party leadership, but the agenda for the meeting did not include that as a proposal for discussion.