The CUBA Communist Party has announced that Miguel Díaz-Canel will succeed Raúl Castro as the party’s first secretary.
Díaz-Canel, who succeeded Castro as President of Cuba in 2018, had been widely tipped for the more influential controversial position of party leader.
The transformation means that the island will be governed by someone other than Fidel or Raúl Castro for the first time since the Cuban revolution of 1959.
Díaz-Canel is considered loyal to the Castros and their economic model.
Speaking on Friday, when Díaz-Canel had not yet been officially named as First Secretary, Raúl Castro said he would pass the leadership to a younger generation “full of passion and anti-imperialist spirit.”
At the age of 60, Díaz-Canel is almost 30 years younger than its predecessor.
It follows the announcement on Friday – on the first day of the party’s four-day congress – that Raúl Castro is stepping down from the key post of First Secretary. The 89-year-old had been in office since 2011, when he took over from his older brother Fidel Castro.
Between them, the two brothers have ruled Cuba since the 1959 revolution that overthrew the authoritarian ruler Gen Fulgencio Batista.
Fidel Castro was the country’s leader from 1959. He became ill in 2006 and two years later formally transferred the presidency to his brother.
Fidel Castro died in 2016, but his brother Raúl held the Cuba Communist Party’s grip on power on the island.
Although Miguel Díaz-Canel was born after the Cuban revolution, he is regarded as one of his best defenders and a close ally of the Castros. He began his political career in his early 20s as a member of the Young Communist Alliance in Santa Clara, a city dominated by the mausoleum of Che Guevara, who fought alongside the Castros in the Cuban revolution.
He worked his way up the ranks and became Minister of Higher Education in 2009.
In 2013, he became the Vice President of the powerful State Council. Five years later, in 2018, he was elected President of Cuba by the country’s National Assembly with 99.83 percent of the vote in a process fully overseen by the ruling Communist Party.
Under the leadership of Díaz-Canel, Cuba has maintained good relations with North Korea, China, Russia, Bolivia and Venezuela.
And while pledged to defend Cuba’s sovereignty and the ideals of the Castros, it is facing a country that has been broken into its most serious economic crisis for decades.
Cuba’s economy rebounded 11 percent last year as the COVID-19 pandemic as well as tighter financial sanctions and restrictions imposed by the US Government under former President Donald Trump hit the island hard.
Díaz-Canel welcomed the election of President Joe Biden and said that he believed that “constructive bilateral relations respecting someone else’s differences” was possible under the new President.
In his final address to the Communist Party on Friday, Castro echoed that sentiment, saying that “there is a willingness to have a respectful dialogue and build a new kind of relationship with the United States.”
However, with the White House saying that a change in its policy towards Cuba was not among President Joe Biden’s top foreign policy priorities, any potential changes in relations between the two countries still seem far away. (BBC)