The ruling Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) 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 most powerful 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 know how it will unfold due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For some experts, Diaz-Canel, who is 60 years old, will arrive very worn out internally and without a clear perspective of what relations with the United States will be, being a fact no less because, as far as mandate of Joe Biden, has not overturned any of the 250 sanctions imposed on Cuba by the previous Donald Trump administration.
With more than a billion pesos invested in free treatments and the development of five vaccines against covid-19, Cuba has been suffering from an acute lack of liquidity and productivity since the end of 2019. it tries to surpass by means of the greater economic reform company in half a century, but without results of magnitude to date and with a high social impact by the increase in the cost of living.
“This reform contains errors in (centralized) price design and an unrealistic appreciation of the country’s production conditions (…) Of the 358 state entities operating in Cuba’s agricultural sector, 44 percent were unprofitable at the close of last January, “he said. the doctor in Economic Sciences, Pedro Monreal.
Three years ago, when he gave Díaz-Canel the presidency of government and the state, Raúl Castro said he was “the only survivor” of the youth who were preparing to assume the leadership of the nation, and added the desire that “when I am absent I can assume this condition of president of the councils of state and ministers and first secretary of the PCC,” an aspiration that so far has not has varied.
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 limits), only 6.9 percent, concentrated at the national (command) level.
The power structure
Fidel Castro, who retired from public life in 2006 and died in 2016, and his brother Raúl, led the destinies of Cuba after the triumph of the revolution in 1959. When the latter handed over the leadership of the PCC, the generational change that has been happening step by step for more than a decade will have been completed.
According to the command structure on the island, without comparison with the schemes in force in other American countries for its one-party system, to the first secretary of the PCC, responsibilities that assumed first Fidel and then Raúl, they have been subordinated since the presidencies of government and from the state, to the military high command.
“Cuba has been a country dominated by strong men,” says academic Arturo López-Levy. For this reason, both diplomats and political scientists and street Cubans agree that “Raúl has always had the last word in decisions of Díaz-Canel in government and probably has it as long as health accompanies him when he hands over the leadership of the PCC. ”
“The men in the hammocks”
For the Cuban chronicler Ángel Tomás González (1946-2019) until 2006, “the strong men from Cuba slept in hammocks just like Fidel and Raúl in the days of the guerrillas. “And six of them are still members of the Political Bureau (BP) of the PCC, the country’s main collegiate governing body.
The 17-member bureau is headed by Raúl Castro (he will turn 90 in June), as First Secretary of the PCC, and has second-in-command guerrilla commander José Ramón Machado Ventura, 90.
It is also made up of the Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdés (88 years old), the only survivor along with Raúl in the BP of the assault on the Moncada barracks (1953), considered the beginning of the revolution, and the landing of the ‘iot Granma (1956). They are also made up of former guerrillas now Generals Leopoldo Cintra Fredes, Ramón Espinosa and Álvaro López Miera, minister, deputy minister and chief of staff of the armed forces respectively, aged between 77 and 83 years.
The second change of significance, therefore, is expected with the retirements of Machado Ventura, who is usually identified with the hard sector within the PCC, and Valdés, who is also deputy prime minister. But it will be necessary to wait for the final composition of the BP, kept hermetically sealed until today, to assess what would be the relations between the future head of the PCC and his second in command, as well as with the “men of the hammocks “that could remain at the head of the armed forces.
OMZI