When Raul Castro announced the end of his family dynasty’s hold on power in Cuba, Horacio Llerena was happy to see him leave.
Llerena, a New Jersey contractor, escaped 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.
“Were happy. We’ve been waiting for it,” said Llerena, 61, who played rummy with friends at Jose Marti Park in Union City. Inside the park is a bronze bust of the 19th-century Cuban poet and patriot, who died in 1880. Exile lived in New York until he returned to fight against Spanish imperialism in Cuba, where he died in 1895.
Like Marti, Llerena originally moved to New York City from Havana. Llerena has lived in New Jersey since 1982, he said. Named Havana on the Hudson, Union City and West New York have been home to a small Cuban community since the 1940s.
Although Raul Castro, 89, stepped down as leader of the island’s ruling Communist Party, little will change on the island, Llerena said.
“Anyone dealing with the Communist Party has to go,” Llerena said. “All the remaining people have to pay for all the crimes of the past 61 years.”
After serving two terms as president of Cuba, Raul Castro stepped down in 2018, allowing his hand-picked successor Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez to take over the presidency. In 2008, Raul Castro took over the leadership of Cuba from his older brother Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who has ruled the island since he toppled Fulgencio Batista’s regime in 1959. Fidel Castro died in 2016.
Although Diaz-Canel is part of a younger generation of politicians on the island, he is serving on behalf of Raul Castro and is unlikely to make significant changes on the island, other Cuban-American critics told The Post.
“They talk well, but I don’t see any difference,” said Tony, 52, a first-generation Cuban American who runs La Pola, his family’s Cuban restaurant in West New York. In 2018, a Food Network critic named the restaurant’s Cuban sandwich the best in the US, sparking a feud with other Cuban Florida communities.
“It’s only one to pass the torch to another,” Tony said of the transfer of power on the island.
Diaz-Canel is likely to be elected as the Communist Party’s secretary general at this weekend’s party congress. Both the presidency and the head of the party are traditionally held by the same leader in the country.