It didn’t work out exactly according to Castro’s plan.
The tourism-dependent island has been ravaged by the pandemic; According to government estimates, the economy will shrink by at least 11% by 2020. Cubans spend hours in long queues every day to find increasingly scarce food, medicine and other supplies.
With then-US President Barack Obama, Castro restored long-fraught US-Cuban relations, only to see those ties blown up again under the Trump administration, which carried out some of the island’s toughest economic punishments in decades.
But until now, current President Joe Biden has been reluctant to engage with the communist-led island, despite the most significant change in leadership in Cuba in decades.
“Regardless of which government we have, Republican or Democrat, now is a good time to join,” said former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), a rare GOP member to push for better relations, who Raul said. Castro met on frequent trips to Cuba. “It benefits the Cuban people and puts pressure on the Cuban government that they don’t have if we try to isolate them.”
It’s hard to imagine a more precarious time for the last members of the aging generation who turned Cuba into a socialist state to finally ease their grip on power. Despite growing uncertainty, Cubans expect to witness a historic change of guard at this week’s 8th Congress for the Cuban Communist Party, “the highest body” of the only political party allowed on the island.
Congress opens Friday, timed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Cuba’s victory over CIA-trained exiles in 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, the Cuban head of state has always led the party, making it nearly impossible to determine where the government ends and the party begins.
“After that,” said Castro in 2018, “if my health permits, I’ll just be another soldier with the people defending this revolution.”
His departure ends the era of his famous clan that holds the highest 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 the Cuban Ministry of the Interior and his daughter Mariela runs a government center promoting LGBTQ rights. A son-in-law, General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas, runs a sprawling military company that controls state hotels, marinas and infrastructure projects, but he has a low public profile.
Even if they continue to wield unquestionable power on the island, once congress is over, no one with the surname 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 as government officials recognize that the island urgently needs to adapt. Finding the way to modernize the Cuban economy will now fall entirely on the shoulders of Miguel Diaz-Canel, Castro’s successor as president, who is expected to take over the head of the communist party.
Trained as an electrical engineer, Diaz-Canel led local governments in two provinces before becoming Minister of Higher Education and then Vice President and President.
Diaz Canel is the first Cuban to be born and become president after the 1959 revolution. Gaining leadership of the party will further allow the tall, gray-haired technocrat to become the Castros’ political heir. But it remains unclear how it differs from its predecessors.
“I believe in continuity,” Díaz-Canel told reporters in 2018 when asked about his vision for Cuba’s future. “I think there will always be continuity.”
Diaz-Canel has tried to project a more active image onto the Cuban audience by posting regularly on Twitter. He immediately attended the still-smoldering scene of a 2018 passenger plane crash in Havana that killed 112 people, and he holds cabinet meetings all over the island like Fidel Castro used to do.
The perception may have changed a bit, but Diaz-Canel is an outspoken advocate of the ideology that rigid state control of the economy remains the best way forward 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 “mal nacidos” or who were born in the wrong country.
Even with all the official talk of maintaining the course, Cuba is changing. Many in Cuba’s emerging private sector are openly complaining about the slow pace of reforms. Artists tired of official censorship and activists pushing for legislation to protect animal rights have used increased Internet access to stage and publicize small protests that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
As the Cuban government faces increasing challenges and threats, some hardliners may be wary of Raúl Castro’s departure. But former Senator Jeff Flake told CNN that Castro probably won’t resist last-minute calls to stay.
He certainly seems a lot more willing to walk into the sunset than his brother. He always talked about his grandchildren and his family, ”Flake said.
“But to really go further, to deliver the reforms that Cuba needs, they will have to go way beyond the Castros.”