When Raúl Castro announced the end of the family dynasty’s takeover of power in Cuba, Horacio Llerena was happy to see him leave.
Llerena, a New Jersey contractor, escaped from the communist island as part of a mass migration of Cubans known as the Mariel boat lift in 1980, when Raul’s brother, Fidel Castro, was at the helm.
“We are happy. We’ve been waiting for it, “said Llerena, 61, who played rowing with friends at Jose Marti Park in Union City. The park features a bronze bust of the 19th-century Cuban poet and patriot, who lived in exile in New York from 1880 until he fought again against Spanish imperialism in Cuba, where he died in 1895.
Like Marti, Llerena originally moved to New York from Havana. Llerena has lived in New Jersey since 1982, he said. Bent Havana in Hudson, Union City and West New York have been home to a small Cuban community since the 1940s.
Although Raúl Castro, 89, left his leadership of the ruling Communist Party on the island, little will change on the island, Llerena said.
“Everyone who has to do with the Communist Party has to leave,” Llerena said. “All the people left alive have to pay for all the crimes of the last 61 years.”
After serving two terms as president of Cuba, Raúl Castro resigned in 2018 and allowed his hand-picked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermudez, to assume the presidency. In 2008, Raúl Castro took over the leadership of Cuba from his older brother Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had ruled the island since he overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Fidel Castro died in 2016.
Although Diaz-Canel is part of a younger generation of politicians on the island, he is serving at the behest of Raúl Castro and is unlikely to make radical changes on the island, other Cuban critics told The Post Americans.
“They speak very well, but I don’t see any difference,” said Tony, 52, a first-generation American Cuban who runs La Pola, his family’s Cuban restaurant in western New York. In 2018, a Food Network critic called the restaurant’s Cuban sandwich the best in the United States, sparking a dispute with other Cuban communities in Florida.
“It’s just one to pass the torch to another,” Tony said of the handover of power on the island.
Diaz-Canel will likely be elected general secretary of the Communist Party during this weekend’s party congress. Both the presidency and the party leader have traditionally been occupied by the country’s own leader.