What is the challenge of the president of Cuba without Raúl Castro?
3:30
Editor's note:
Jorge Dávila Miguel has a degree in Journalism since 1973 and has maintained a continuous career in his profession to date. He has postgraduate degrees in Social Information Sciences and Social Media, as well as post-university studies in International Relations, Political Economy and Latin American History. Currently, Dávila Miguel is a columnist for El Nuevo Herald, on the McClatchy network, and a political analyst and columnist for CNN en Español. The comments expressed in this column belong exclusively to the author. See more at cnne.com/opinion
(CNN Spanish) -
The VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba began this Friday with three outstanding objectives: the review of the economic policies and goals established during the VII Congress;
the analysis of the role of said party in its political work in the face of the new economic order, and the dismissal of Raúl Castro, who will be 90 years old in two months, as the top leader of the Communist Party and the Cuban Government.
After 62 years there will no longer be a Castro in power.
The first two objectives can be easily analyzed, certified and diluted through a convenient political dialectic.
But not the withdrawal of Raúl, the bearer of a “historical legitimacy” in the national political idiosyncrasy due to the revolutionary triumph of 1959, considered a “source of law”.
Raúl Castro resigns as head of the Communist Party of Cuba
But what consequences will the retirement of the last of the Castros, whose authority and respect is solid in the spheres of Cuban power, have?
The current situation in Cuba is the most acute since the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s. The economy shrank by 11% in 2020, 3.3% more than the regional decline.
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The covid-19 pandemic may be defeated with Cuban vaccines, still in the testing phase, and how good;
But what will happen to the economic epidemic, endemic in the national socio-political reality for six decades.
Who will carry the necessary changes?
Not those of looking good in the photos of Granma, but the necessary ones.
Cuban power is like a deep-sea vessel, sailing towards a socialism defined by an ancient ideology, which died in Moscow 30 years ago, and which seems to be heading into the thin waters of greater national poverty.
Under Raúl Castro, that has been the course, but Castro had "historical legitimacy."
Now, how can the new first secretary of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Miguel Díaz-Canel, be legitimized before the population by becoming the greatest political figure in Cuba?
Despite Joe Biden's promises to return to Barack Obama's Cuban policy, it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon.
Biden has his plate full with national affairs, because he is the president of the United States, not of Cuba. It is expected that after this congress, the main Cuban politician will be Miguel Díaz-Canel. And he will be the one who will have to resolve Cuban affairs. The fair and repeated theme of the US embargo against Cuba is well known, and it is true that it affects –– and greatly–– the island economically, there is no doubt. But Cuba is a sovereign country, not dependent on anyone, especially the United States. Now, it is his turn to prove it again in this difficult and renewed situation. Without so much crying.
To achieve legitimacy before the Cuban population, Díaz-Canel will have, necessarily, to improve the minimum living conditions of ordinary Cubans. It is not much to ask for “a revolution bigger than ourselves,” as Fidel Castro proclaimed in January 1959. If the Cuban Government does not make the necessary changes to improve the daily life of the population, possibly, the people will look for how to make them . Will Díaz-Canel have to twist the mysterious course of the national ship a little, a little or a lot? To Vietnam, to China, to a particularly Cuban socialism, to Numancia, to the unprecedented discovery of a quantum socialism?
And if he finds the right course for the national ship –– currently immersed in a quasi-neoliberal reform, not in name, but in effect––, the first secretary will have a formidable and hidden enemy in the ship's crew. It is the protean Cuban political-economic bureaucracy –– created by state parsimony–– always changing and always the same, accustomed to saying a ritual yes to those above, while taking advantage of what it can: a weekend at the beach, a packed with food, the privilege of feeling part of something “bigger than ourselves”.
Except for the honest Cubans, there are many of them, this bureaucracy extends everywhere and in lines, the same behind the parliamentary or partisan bureau as behind the butcher's platform.
They are easily identifiable, next First Secretary Díaz-Canel: they are the ones who always say yes.
Because Cubans who say no, and theirs is also the street, are punished.
Thus, in a few days there will be no Castro in the Cuban power structures;
incidentally, an express condition of Helms-Burton to make US policy towards Cuba more flexible.
We will see how the next first secretary of the PCC Miguel Díaz-Canel, born after the Cuban Revolution, gains his legitimacy when the protective figure of Raúl Castro disappears from his shoulder.
You will need to earn it.
The loneliness of the long-distance runner.
