Things did not work out exactly according to Castro’s plan.
The tourism-dependent island has been plagued by the pandemic; the economy has shrunk by at least 11% by 2020, according to government estimates. Cubans spend hours every day in long queues to find increasingly scarce food, medicine and other necessities.
With then-US President Barack Obama, Castro restored long-standing fraudulent relations between the United States and Cuba, only to see that ties were inflated again under the Trump administration, which imposed some of the toughest economic fines on the island in decades. .
But so far, incumbent President Joe Biden has been reluctant to enter into talks with the communist island, despite the most significant change in leadership in Cuba in decades.
“No matter what government we have, Republican or Democrat, this is a good time to get involved,” said former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), a rare member of the GOP to strive for improved relations, which during regular meetings with Raul Castro trips to Cuba. “It benefits the Cuban people and puts pressure on the Cuban government that they do not have if we try to isolate them.”
It is difficult to imagine a more difficult time for the last members of the aging generation who transformed Cuba into a socialist state to finally loosen their grip on power. Despite the deepening of uncertainty, the Cubans expect to see a historic change during the eighth Congress for the Cuban Communist Party, ‘the highest body’ of the only political party allowed on the island.
Congress begins Friday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Cuba’s victory over CIA-trained exiles during the Bay of Pigs invasion. And Raul Castro is expected to relinquish control as first secretary of the Communist Party.
Since the early years of the revolution, Cuba’s head of state has always led the party, making it impossible to determine where the government ends and the party begins.
“After that,” Castro said in 2018, “if my health allows it, I will be just one more soldier with the people defending this revolution.”
His departure will put an end to the era of his famous tribe that holds the best leadership on the island. None of the children of Castro’s older brother Fidel, who died in 2015, hold government positions.
Raul Castro’s son, Alejandro, is a colonel in Cuba’s Interior Ministry and his daughter Mariela runs a government center promoting LGBTQ rights. A son-in-law, Genl. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas, heads a large-scale military company that manages state-owned hotels, marinas and infrastructure projects, but he has a low public profile.
Even if they continue to exercise undeniable power on the island, no one named Castro will hold a senior leadership position for the first time in more than 62 years.
Cuba is one of the countries that has changed the least since the end of the Cold War, even though government officials acknowledge that the island needs to adapt urgently. The road to modernizing Cuba’s economy will now squarely fall on the shoulders of Miguel Diaz-Canel, Castro’s successor as president, who is expected to take over as head of the Communist Party.
Diaz-Canel was trained as an electrical engineer and managed local governments in two provinces before becoming Minister of Higher Education and then Vice President and President.
Diaz Canel is the first Cuban born after the 1959 revolution to become president. Acquiring the party’s leadership will establish the long, gray-haired technocrat further than the political heir of the Castros. But it remains unclear how he differs from his predecessors.
“I believe in continuity,” Díaz-Canel told reporters in 2018 when asked about his vision for the future of Cuba. “I think there will always be continuity.”
Diaz-Canel tried to project a more active image to the Cuban public and regularly posted it on Twitter. He immediately visited the still smoldering scene of a passenger plane crash in 2018 in Havana that killed 112 people, and he holds cabinet meetings across the island as Fidel Castro did earlier.
The optics may have changed somewhat, but Diaz-Canel is a speaker of the ideology that rigid state control over the economy remains the best path for Cuba, despite decades of stagnant economic growth. And any public opposition to the party line, he said, is the work of Cubans who are ‘crazy nacidos’ or born in the wrong country.
Even all the official talk about maintaining the course is changing Cuba. Many in Cuba’s emerging private sector are openly complaining about the slow pace of reforms. Artists fed up with official censorship and activists campaigning for animal rights legislation have used increased internet access to organize and publish small protest marches that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
As the Cuban government faces more challenges and threats, some hardliners may be wary of the resignation of Raul Castro. Former Senator Jeff Flake told CNN that Castro would probably be able to resist an appeal at the last minute.
“He definitely seems more willing to walk into the sunset than his brother did. He would always talk about his grandchildren and his family,” Flake said.
“But to really go ahead, to implement the reforms that Cuba needs, they will have to move far beyond the Castros.”