Cuba's Castro Keeping Top Job as Leadership Changes Loom

HAVANA — President Raul Castro will serve a second term as head of Cuba's Communist Party alongside other veterans, as the island's aging leaders see out a final period in power amid economic reform and detente with the United States.

The Communist Party, whose leadership elections were announced by state media on Tuesday, wants avoid any chaotic collapse as it wrestles with economic change and a transition from the generation of leaders who fought in the 1959 revolution.

Speaking at the closure of a four-day party congress, Castro, 84, said it would be the last one headed by the current leaders, signaling that they would step aside sometime before the next such meeting in five years.

"This seventh congress will be the last one led by the historic generation," Castro said.

Castro had proposed age limits and term limits for top leaders as the party gathered for the start of the congress over the weekend, raising expectations septuagenarian and octogenarian veterans would begin to step aside.

But he also made clear that such changes would not be rushed.

"(We will) introduce the necessary changes, without hurry and with no improvisation, which would only lead to failure," he said on Tuesday.

At the end of the congress, the first since 2011, the Communist Party said Castro had been re-elected as first secretary, with Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, 85, re-elected as second secretary.