Raúl Castro says he will step down, marking end of era as Cuba faces economic crisis
A feared general, he also shook hands with Obama. What will Raúl Castro’s legacy be?
The retirement house in Cuba’s Oriente province is reportedly under construction. And its 89-year-old owner, Raúl Castro, said Friday he is relinquishing power.
The designated inheritor of Castro’s title as head of the Cuban Communist Party is expected to be President Miguel Díaz-Canel. The transition will be scripted and smooth.
And that unlikely continuity might well be Castro’s most significant legacy.
For decades, many people believed Cuba’s perpetually tottering communist regime would collapse once its charismatic, larger-than-life leader, Fidel Castro, was out of the way. His loyal-to-the-hilt younger brother proved them wrong.
Raúl Castro told members of the Communist Party that he will resign as first secretary as the regime that he and his brother, Fidel, spearheaded over six decades ago faces a crushing economic crisis and mounting social tensions.
Sixty-two years after leading a guerrilla army out of the mountain jungles of Cuba and helping his brother, Fidel Castro, impose communist rule over the island, Raúl Castro on Friday said he will give up his hold on formal power in the nation’s affairs.
As had been widely expected, Raúl Castro, 89, said he was stepping down as head of the Cuban Communist Party, the island’s dominant political force, during a subdued opening session of the body’s
Eighth Congress in Havana.
In remarks during an address to delegates in Havana’s convention center, Raúl Castro announced he would not seek to retain any high post in the party, though he stressed he would remain an active party member, according to sound and video excerpts and reports in official Cuban media.
“As far as I’m concerned, my task as first secretary to the central committee of the PCC ends with the satisfaction of having fulfilled my mission and the confidence in the future of the fatherland,” Raúl Castro said.
He added: “I will continue participating as one more revo
Raúl Castro ensured the regime’s longevity at the cost of fundamental liberties and despite chronic economic woes.
If Fidel was the impetuous, visionary architect of the Cuban revolution, Raúl has been the methodical engineer who, content to work in his vainglorious brother’s shadow, built its rigid superstructure and ruthlessly ensured it held up for more than 60 years.
Raúl Castro will confer the legitimacy of the Cuban revolution on a younger generation of leaders tasked with extending its longevity — and its grip on an increasingly disenchanted, restive population enduring yet another of the island’s recurrent economic crises — without a Castro in charge.
“With the older generation, Raúl Castro is a figure that continues to command a certain respect,” said Michael Bustamante, professor of
Latin American history and a specialist on Cuba at Florida International University. “For younger generations that know only one degree of crisis or another, the cachet of that historic leadership has been lost, which is putting it mildly. For those who saw in him the possibility that a reformist path would emerge, his time in office will be remembered as a lost opportunity.”
Raúl Castro, who had taken over the presidency after his brother Fidel’s health abruptly declined in 2006, gave up that post in 2018 but held onto the leadership of the uberpowerful Communist Party.
As president, DíazCanel has exhibited unstinting loyalty to
Raúl Castro and his hardline intolerance of the slightest dissent. But whether he can replicate the high-wire act that Castro perfected during his long years as his brother’s understudy or command the same authority over rival factions in the island’s communist elite is uncertain, veteran Cuba watchers say.
The job for Díaz-Canel, or whoever ends up in the top party post, will be complicated by the crisis bequeathed by Castro, in part, the consequence of Raúl’s achievements as much as his biggest failure — the inability to fully implement long-promised, lasting economic reform to lift the Cuban people’s woeful standard of living.
While the fearsome police state that Raúl Castro built remains very much in place, under his presidency, Cubans could for the first time under communist rule visit hotels, buy and sell real estate, freely travel abroad, own cellphones and navigate the internet — giving them a taste of freedom and unfettered news and information that’s only fueling demands for more, something that Cuba experts say any successor will find nearly impossible to shut down.
The limited nature of Castro’s changes failed to ignite the stagnant Cuban economy or attract significant foreign investment even as longstanding deficits and debt forced the regime to cut subsidies to the poorest of its citizens and lay off hundreds of thousands of government workers.
A currency reform made already meager official salaries nearly worthless, while the opening of stores taking only U.S. dollars and serving the island’s elite and those receiving remittances from relatives abroad further fueled widening economic gaps in a supposedly egalitarian society.
Meanwhile, the signal accomplishment of Castro’s term as president, the 2015 renewal of diplomatic ties with the United States after 18 months of secret negotiations with the Obama administration, is effectively frozen. The U.S. evacuated most of its embassy staff after some diplomats were stricken by a mysterious ailment. The Trump administration tightened sanctions, playing to the demands of an increasingly hardline Cuban-American electorate. President Joe Biden’s administration has sent mixed signals about its approach to Cuba.
The loss of patronage due to Venezuela’s economic collapse and the virtual shutdown of Cuba’s critically important tourism industry by the COVID-19 pandemic have ignited a full-blown crisis. Some analysts compare the island’s dire straits to the worst years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the loss of its generous economic subsidies in the 1990s. Cubans not in the elite must again wait in line for hours to secure scant supplies of food and basic goods.
Tensions have openly risen. Unusual street protests by artists and residents of a poor Havana neighborhood have been met with a heavy police response, while dissidents in Santiago, the biggest city in Castro’s native Oriente province, long seen as a hotbed of revolutionary fervor, recently carried out a well-publicized hunger strike in demanding greater civil liberties.
The view from the bottom, especially from younger Cubans, is hardly reverential.
“Fidel must be rolling around under his (burial) rock to see the legacy of Raúl and Díaz-Canel,” said Diana Rodríguez, 24, a human-resources director at a state firm in the southern city of Cienfuegos, in a phone interview. “The situation here gets worse every time. There is no food or cleaning supplies. Money is worth less and less. People are getting violently angry standing in the street in line for 10 and 12 hours. This is the legacy of those incompetents.”
LOYALISTS IN KEY POSITIONS
Experts say the government’s handling of the crisis mirrors an old pattern set by Raúl Castro while at his brother’s side: Enact limited reforms to relieve an emergency, only to retrench when conditions ease or regular citizens begin amassing too much wealth or exercising too much autonomy for Raúl Castro’s authoritarian taste.
Now, some modest reforms designed to promote limited self-employment and small-scale enterprises are back on the table.
But it’s unclear how much longer that yo-yo will work, whether it’s Raúl Castro or his designated successor’s finger holding the string.
“Cuba is at a more delicate moment now than in the last 30 years,” said Ted Henken, a specialist in Cuban culture and society at Baruch College in New York. “The economic crisis is complicated by socio-cultural political upheaval that’s been energized by access to internet and social media. There’s also an erosion of the state’s ability to control the hearts and minds of the artistic and intellectual class.”
In spite of the population’s spiraling desperation and increasing unrest, the brutally effective surveillance and security apparatus that Castro constructed remains firmly in control and has even expanded its reach, experts say.
Raúl, who built Cuba’s once-formidable armed forces and set up its feared Ministry of the Interior in the early days of Fidel’s rule, also leaves behind a cadre of loyalists who owe him their jobs in key posts and a growing private affluence. As power shifted from Fidel to his younger brother, Raúl began replacing the island’s leadership, said Brian Latell, formerly the CIA’s top Cuban analyst and author of a 2007 biography of Raúl.
In one of his most consequential moves, Castro oversaw the conversion of the military into the country’s dominant economic force. He sent generals to Europe for MBAs and put them in charge of key sectors, including mining, state stores and hotel and tourism enterprises.
“Raúl began systematically, and drastically, revamping the leadership,” Latell said. “Within a few years, all the key people in the government, party and military were his people, not Fidel’s.”
Today, the military and its entrepreneurial offshoot, known by its Spanish-language acronym of GAESA, control as much as 80% of the Cuban economy. The head of GAESA is Castro’s former son-in-law, Colonel Luis Alberto Rodríguez LópezCalleja; though divorced from Castro’s daughter, he and Raúl are still reportedly close.
While the wealthy elite is insulated from the physical want that most Cubans on the island experience, that broader populace is subjected to an ever-increasing degree of surveillance and forced obeisance under the security system devised by Castro, said Lillian Guerra, a University of Florida history professor who frequently traveled to the island before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The streets of Havana today bristle with security cameras, roads across the country have elaborate new police checkpoints,
and entrepreneurs are forced to inform on customers and neighbors to obtain business licenses — measures put in place in the years of rule by DíazCanel and Raúl Castro, Guerra said.
“He’s not popular. He’s never been revered,” Guerra said of Raúl Castro. “He was feared. The fact that his minions are still around, that matters. That Díaz-Canel is still parroting the same intransigence, and that violent repression of just minor incidents of defiance also continues, that also matters.”
‘RAÚL THE TERRIBLE’
The roots of Castro’s devotion to communist orthodoxy and doctrinaire control go back to his youth in the rustic eastern rural backwater of Birán. Whether Raúl led Fidel to communism or vice-versa is a matter of unsettled debate. But it was the younger brother who first publicly identified with the Soviet version of communism, joined the island’s communist youth movement and traveled on a tour of Eastern bloc countries.
Raúl accompanied Fidel on two famed if neardisastrous rebel missions against the unpopular rule of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista — the attack on the Moncada army barracks in 1953 and the 1956 landing of the Granma yacht from Mexico. The latter event launched the revolution.
Most of the Castros’ rebel bands were wiped out in the incursions, but the luck and keen instinct for survival that would characterize their later rule saved the brothers from the same fate. After Moncada, they were imprisoned for 22 months but were spared execution. Released, they went to Mexico to plan the invasion aboard the Granma, after which they launched their guerrilla war in Cuba’s mountains.
Raúl Castro helped his brother consolidate his leadership of the revolution, exploiting political divisions to pit rivals against one another. He also led the so-called second front in the Sierra Cristal in eastern Cuba and scored military victories that Fidel biographer Georgie Anne Geyer called a “little less than brilliant,” in military terms at least outshining his brother’s smaller and less effective group of rebels, who never numbered more than a few
hundred.
While in command,
Raúl Castro became notorious for summary executions of informants and deserters and, in the weeks immediately after Batista fled on Dec. 31, 1958, of soldiers and supporters of the dictatorship for alleged war crimes. Historians say the executions numbered in the hundreds, including more than 70 in a few days after the revolution’s triumph, something that he publicly boasted about, Guerra said.
Castro sometimes sardonically called himself “Raúl the Terrible” in reference to his executioner’s role. Those days in the mountains set the template for Raúl Castro’s subsequent approach once in power, Guerra said.
“What it showed was that Raúl was never accountable to the people, and he didn’t care what people thought,” she said. “He remains the very same man.”
HIS BROTHER’S PROTECTOR
Raúl Castro put that same ruthlessness in service of his brother’s often whimsical aims as Cuba’s ruler, sidelining and protecting him from rivals and enemies through purges and prison.
Though the brothers often disagreed, sometimes to the point of violent argument, Raúl always publicly yielded to his brother, historians say.
“Raúl Castro’s job was eliminating people who were a threat to Fidel,” said Andy Gomez, a Cuba scholar and former senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. “He was the hatchet man for Fidel. He had no choice or he would not have survived. It would not have mattered that Raúl was his brother if Raúl Castro had gone against Fidel. He was really one of the very few that survived Fidel Castro’s narcissistic power hunger.”
The early East Bloc and Soviet ties that Raúl had cultivated proved fruitful for the government that he and Fidel gradually consolidated control over, just as they had seized leadership of the revolution.
Once in power, Raúl Castro often visited the USSR in the successful search for aid, weaponry and political support as he built the Cuban army into a formidable international force entangled in foreign wars and leftist uprisings in Angola and elsewhere.
The younger Castro was such a frequent and welcome guest at the country dacha of Nikita Khrushchev that he began calling the Soviet leader “abuelo.” It was during one such meeting that Khrushchev promised Cuba nuclear weapons, setting the table for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Even more than Fidel, Raúl Castro also became the chief enforcer of Soviet-style orthodoxy in Cuba, modeling his security apparatus on the KGB and state intelligence’s absolute control over every facet of civilian life. For Raúl, who unlike his lawyer brother never finished high school, his appetite for absolutist rule was tinged with special disdain for artists and intellectuals. He mistrusted them as unreliable or subversive by nature even when they professed loyalty to the revolutionary cause, Guerra and others say.
Raúl was largely responsible for creating a new category of crime for “diversionism,” which made even incipient doubts about Communist Party dogma and policies cause for arrest, prosecution and long prison terms for hundreds, and maybe thousands, of Cubans to this day, Guerra said.
Those networks of surveillance in workplaces and neighborhoods through the establishment of defense of the revolution committees, the handiwork of Raúl Castro, effectively turned ordinary Cubans into thought police to survive, she said.
”Anybody could be accused. Hundreds of thousands of people would be constantly harassed by police,” Guerra said. “This is the nature of the terror that Raúl Castro normalized — this idea that you can’t doubt, that doubt is the greatest threat the revolution faces.
“Raul is more responsible even more than Fidel of institutionalizing these intimate forms of repression. When you talk about states that endure, what makes them durable is that the citizens become complicit in their own repression . ... You didn’t have a choice.”
RAÚL CASTRO BUILT THE CUBAN REGIME’S RIGID SUPERSTRUCTURE AND RUTHLESSLY ENSURED IT HELD UP FOR MORE THAN 60 YEARS.
A ‘COMPLICATED’ LEGACY
Yet after assuming the presidency, Raúl Castro did loosen some longtime strictures, though always with a pragmatic goal, such as generating revenue or reducing public disaffection, while maintaining ultimate control.
Among the most important reform measures that Raúl introduced was the liberalization of restrictions regulating Cuban travel abroad, generating a new stream of foreign exchange. In another dramatic turnaround, he allowed expatriate Cubans to return to the island and stay for as long as three months at a time.
But ultimately, faced with a choice of further liberalization that could endanger his political control, the latter won out. After artists, filmmakers and writers began earning a living without government in a previous round of reforms, some also began ignoring or challenging communist orthodoxy. The government responded by prohibiting artistic production not approved first by the Ministry of Culture, prompting protests and arrests.
Securing that control for the long-term was so important to Raúl that he installed his son and most trusted adviser, Alejandro Castro Espín, a colonel in
the interior ministry, as “czar” of all intelligence services. Analysts believe he is being groomed for another leadership role.
That doesn’t mean a Castro family dynasty is in the offing, observers say. No other Castro descendant appears in line for any significant role in the government, they note.
“I do not see a Castro dynasty evolving once Raúl is out of the picture,” Gomez said. “Raúl wants to leave a few institutions in place to move what he calls a new advanced socialist state, whatever that means.”
How much influence Raúl Castro intends to wield over his successor is also unknown. It’s widely assumed he will at a minimum retain veto power over any moves, much as Fidel appeared to enjoy after his retirement, when he’s believed to have played a role in stalling progress in the re-establishment of U.S. relations.
Because of the opacity of the Cuban government, though, it’s impossible to say, experts say.
“We’d be naive to think Díaz-Canel is a completely free actor,” FIU’s Bustamante said. “It’s safe to say no major government change in the past two years has happened without Raúl Castro. But is he running the government day to day? I don’t know.
“I don’t know what he does now. I have the impression he’s very keen to retire. But I would not expect to see him jetting around the world.”
If Díaz-Canel carries out the economic reforms that he and, presumably, Castro have laid out, Bustamante added, “that will be a very sizable development.” But if Raúl Castro is to be judged by the early promises of the revolution — social and economic equality, a better life for ordinary Cubans, and full political and economic independence from global powers — his grade is a failing one, Baruch’s Henken said.
His legacy, instead, has been growing inequality, general impoverishment and establishment of an isolated wealthy elite successful mostly at maintaining power at any cost. Henken noted the regime, whose once vaunted health system has fallen into disarray, has failed at containing the COVID pandemic even though communist governments in China and Vietnam have succeeded.
“If you’re an authoritarian government, you would think they could control a virus. But they haven’t been able to do that,” he said.
Raúl Castro’s legacy, Henken concluded, is “complicated,” but whatever success he might be credited with has come at a high price.
Recalling his promise to enact reforms “without haste, but without pause,” Henken said: “The changes that have happened came with great pause and little haste, or haven’t happened at all.
“If Cuba has an institutional, functioning apparatus, Raúl did that. But the cost of preserving power and control has been the continued denial of fundamental freedoms and civil liberties, and chronic economic crisis.”