HAVANA: Cuba’s Raul Castro was just hours away from retiring as president, with his vice president Miguel Diaz-Canel set to replace him in a shift that will usher in the island’s first non-Castro leader since the 1959 revolution.
Castro, 86, was due to step down on Thursday after 10 years in office. He announced his departure several years ago and has long signaled that Diaz-Canel, a 57-year-old Communist Party stalwart, was his likely successor, carefully managing the transition to ensure political continuity.
The move to a younger generation of Communist leaders is historic on an island dominated for nearly 60 years by Fidel Castro and then his brother Raul. But in the short term it is unlikely to herald major changes to the one-party system or state-dominated economic model.
The transition was met with indifference by ordinary Cubans on the streets of Havana, with some saying they felt distant from politics and were more concerned with making ends meet within the limited economic opportunities that opened under Castro’s changes.
“We are more worried about the day to day than politics,” said Ricardo Lugone, 28, who earns his living as a private hairdresser, an industry that was state run until Castro relaxed some restrictions after taking over from his brother Fidel in 2008.
Diaz-Canel, who is currently first vice president, was the only name put forward by a party-backed commission on Wednesday, eliciting a long ovation from lawmakers who later held a closed-door vote to unanimously approve the proposal and 30 other appointments to Cuba’s state council.
The results are expected to be announced on Thursday, and the new president will be sworn in.
Although this week’s assembly is promoting younger government leaders, Castro and other elders of the revolution will retain considerable power in their roles as the top leaders of the Communist Party at least until a party congress set for 2021. Reuters
APP/AFP