Raúl Castro to step down as head of Cuba’s Communist Party

Written by Maria Abi-Habib
Raul Castro introduced Friday that he was handing over management of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party to a youthful era “full of passion and anti-imperialist spirit,” leaving the island nation with no Castro in a high management position for the primary time in over 60 years.
Castro, who turns 90 in June, reiterated his long-anticipated intention to step down in a speech kicking off the Communist Party congress Friday. He is anticipated to formally step down and announce his alternative earlier than the convention ends Monday.
After serving two phrases as Cuba’s president, Castro stepped down from that workplace in 2018, changed by his hand-picked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez.
Cuba’s management will doubtless announce additional reforms through the get together congress, permitting for extra free-market exercise and reorienting the nation’s economic system additional away from the austere, state-run mannequin put in place after the revolution that introduced Castro and his brother, Fidel Castro, to energy in 1959.
The Communist Party has little alternative however to reform or face rising discontent as Cuba faces its worst financial disaster because the Nineties, after the autumn of the Soviet Union. By ushering in a brand new, youthful political class, Castro hopes to set the nation on a course to totally embrace and implement the financial reforms he launched within the years since Fidel Castro — the chief of the revolution — died 5 years in the past.
Raul Castro is seen as extra pragmatic than Fidel Castro, extra keen to inch Cuba away from the communist mannequin that his brother championed, which offered the nation with main developmental successes, together with excessive literacy charges and high quality well being look after all Cubans, however has left the economic system in shambles.

Castro had introduced in 2016 that he would hand over his publish as secretary-general of the Communist Party throughout this yr’s get together congress, with a view to hand over energy to a youthful era. The secretary-general is probably the most highly effective place in Cuba, extra highly effective than the presidency, seen because the second most senior place.

Díaz-Canel will doubtless be elected as the brand new secretary-general of the Communist Party over the weekend, consolidating his management over Cuba. The two roles are sometimes held by the identical individual, with Fidel Castro presiding over each positions for some 30 years.