HAVANA (AP) – Raul Castro on Friday said he was resigning as head of Cuba’s Communist Party and ending an era of formal leadership by him and his brother Fidel Castro, which began the 1959 revolution.
The 89-year-old Castro made the announcement Friday in a speech at the opening of the ruling party’s eighth congress, the only one allowed on the island.
He said he was retiring with the feeling that he would fulfill “his mission and confident in the future of the fatherland”.
Castro did not say who he would endorse as his successor as first secretary of the Communist Party. But he had earlier indicated that he was given the privilege of giving control to 60-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel, who succeeded him as president in 2018 and is the standard-bearer of a younger generation of loyalists who pursued an economic opening without to touch Cuba’s one. party system.
His retirement means that for the first time in more than six decades, the Cubans will not have a Castro to formally gild their affairs, and it comes at a difficult time, with many on the island worried about what lies ahead.
The coronavirus pandemic, painful financial reforms and restrictions imposed by the Trump administration have hurt the economy, which shrank by 11% last year due to a collapse in tourism and money. Long food lines and shortages echoed the ‘special period’ that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Dissatisfaction is fueled by the proliferation of the internet and growing inequality.
Many of the debates within Cuba are focused on the pace of reform, and many complain that the so-called ‘historical generation’ represented by Castro was too slow to open up the economy.
In January, Diaz-Canel finally pulled the trigger on a plan approved two congresses ago to unify the island’s dual currency system, leading to fears of inflation. He also opened the door to a wider range of private enterprises – a category that has long been banned or strictly restricted – allowing Cubans to legally run many self-employed businesses from their homes.
Congress is expected to focus this year on unfinished reforms to revamp state-owned enterprises, attract foreign investment and provide more legal protection to private businesses.
The Communist Party consists of 700,000 activists and has in Cuba’s constitution the task of governing the affairs of the nation and society.
Fidel Castro, who led the revolution that overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, became the party’s formal leader in 1965, about four years after he officially adopted socialism.
He quickly took the old party under his control and was the country’s undisputed leader until he fell ill in 2006 and handed over the presidency in 2008 to his younger brother Raul, who fought with him during the revolution.
Raul succeeds him as head of the party in 2011. Fidel Castro passed away in 2016