Castro Era Ends in Cuba as Diaz-Canel Named President

Cuba is undergoing its biggest political transition since the 1950s as Miguel Diaz-Canel takes office as president, ending six decades of rule by the Castro family.

The National Assembly formally announced Diaz-Canel’s election Thursday following two days of meetings in Havana. Diaz-Canel takes over as the economy goes through its roughest patch since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is the first time the island has been controlled by someone other than Raul and Fidel Castro since the brothers led the 1959 revolution, building a government that has tightly controlled much of the economy and everyday life ever since. Still, the new president will still have to answer to Castro, who will remain head of the Communist Party.

A former minister of higher education and an electrical engineer by training, Díaz-Canel rose up through the Communist Party to become vice president in 2013. His ascent to the presidency is a testament to his survival skills. Several contemporaries who were being groomed for the same job ended up banished to far-flung provinces or low-ranking ministries.

Soviet Union

Cuba watchers say the economy hasn’t been as weak as it is now since the so-called Special Period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Díaz-Canel takes over an economy so full of distortions that trained professionals have left their government jobs because they can earn far more driving taxis for tourists or renting their homes on Airbnb.

Moreover, with the economy of longtime ally Venezuela in free fall, Díaz-Canel may not be able to count on aid from Caracas for much longer. Jorge Piñon, director of the Latin America and Caribbean energy program at the University of Texas at Austin, estimates that shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, once as high as 115,000 barrels per day, have fallen by at least 40 percent in the past decade. If they disappear altogether, Cuba will have trouble paying its fuel bill, Piñon says.

The party selected six vice presidents, only one of whom, Ramiro Valdes Menendez, 85, fought in the revolution. The new makeup of the government “bends slightly toward the side of reform and change,” said James Williams, president of Engage Cuba, a Washington-based coalition of companies that wants to lift the U.S. embargo against Cuba. “How far they will go remains to be seen.”