The ruling Communist Party of Cuba (CCP) will complete the renewal of its main leaders this month, and if the official wish is fulfilled, President Miguel Díaz-Canel will replace Raúl Castro and he could become the strongest man in the structure command on the island.
The change is expected for the next CCP congress, scheduled for April 16-19, which is also expected to take place due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For some experts, Díaz-Canel, who is 60, will arrive internally very worn out and without a clear perspective on what relations with the United States will be like, not a minor fact due to the fact that so far in Joe Biden’s Mandate it did not overturn any of the 250 sanctions imposed on Cuba by Donald Trump’s previous administration.
With over one billion pesos invested in free treatments and the development of five vaccines against covid-19, Cuba has suffered from the end of 2019 an acute lack of liquidity and productivity that the government has it is trying to overcome through the biggest economic reform undertaken in half a century, but without far-reaching results so far and with a high social impact due to rising cost of living.
“It simply came to our notice then contains errors in the (centralized) design of prices and an unrealistic assessment of the country’s production conditions (…) Of the 358 state entities operating in the Cuban agricultural sector, 44% were unprofitable at the end of January last year, “he said. PhD in Economics, Pedro Monreal.
Three years ago, when he handed over the presidency of the government and the state to Díaz-Canel, Raúl Castro said he was the “only survivor” of the young people who were preparing to assume the leadership of the nation and added the wish that “when I am absent I can assume that condition of president of the Council of State and ministers and first secretary of the CCP”, an aspiration that has not changed so far.
According to official data, the average age of all party leaders is 42.5 years; 76.5 percent have been in office for less than five years and with more than 10 (time limit), only 6.9 percent, concentrated nationally (order).
Power structure
Fidel Castro, who retired from public life in 2006 and died in 2016, and his brother Raúl, directed Cuba’s destinies after the triumph of the 1959 revolution. When the latter handed over the leadership of the CCP, the change would be consummated. step by step for more than a decade.
According to the command structure on the island, without comparison with the schemes in force in other American countries due to its one-party system, the first secretary of the CCP, responsibilities assumed first by Fidel and then by Raúl they were subordinated to the presidencies of the government and from the state to the high command of the army.
“Cuba was a country dominated by strong men,” says academician Arturo López-Levy. Therefore, both diplomats, political scientists and ordinary Cubans agree that “Raúl always had the last word in decisions of Díaz-Canel in government and will probably have it as long as his health accompanies him when he pronounces the CCP’s address ”.
“People in hammocks”
For the Cuban chronicler Ángel Tomás González (1946-2019) until 2006, “the strong Cuban people slept in hammocks just like Fidel and Raúl in guerrilla times ”. And six of them still make up the Political Bureau (BP) of the CCP, the main body of the country’s collegiate leadership.
The 17-member bureau is headed by Raúl Castro (he will turn 90 in June), as the CCP’s first secretary, and has 90-year-old guerrilla commander José Ramón Machado Ventura as his second-in-command.
It is also composed of the commander of the revolution Ramiro Valdés (88 years old), the only survivor with Raúl in BP of the assault on the Moncada barracks (1953), considered the beginning of the revolution and the landing of the yacht Granma (1956). They are also made up of former guerrilla generals now Generals Leopoldo Cintra Frías, Ramón Espinosa and Álvaro López Miera, a minister, deputy minister and chief of staff of the armed forces, aged between 77 and 83, respectively.
The second important change, therefore, is expected with the withdrawals of Machado Ventura, who is usually identified with the hard sector within the CCP, and Valdés, who is also deputy prime minister. But we will have to wait for the final composition of BP, which has been kept hermetically silent until today, to assess the relationship between the future CCP leader and his second commander, as well as with the “people in the hammocks” who could be left in the lurch. the front of the armed forces.
OMZI