HAVANA (AFP) – Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel was all set to clinch a second five-year term via a Parliamentary vote yesterday as the sole candidate in a country where political opposition is illegal. Diaz-Canel took over the reins in 2018 as Cuba’s first civilian leader after nearly 60 years of Castro brother hegemony, vowing to “always defend the party” even as he set out in pursuit of cautious economic liberalisation.
In 2021, he also took over as first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), the country’s most powerful position, long held by revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and then his brother Raul.
Now 62, Diaz-Canel’s first term was marked by the worst economic crisis in three decades and a widely criticised response to historic anti-government protests, which triggered a tightening of United States (US) sanctions.
He will be keen for another stab at reform, recently telling the pan-Arab television channel Al Mayadeen he was “dissatisfied” that his efforts at addressing Cuba’s economic woes had not been “more efficient, more effective”.
Under Diaz-Canel, an electronic engineer by training, Cuba partly opened the economy to small businesses in hundreds of sectors previously under exclusive state control.
Two years ago, he initiated a monetary reform that ended artificial parity with the US dollar but fuelled inflation and sharply devalued the local currency another blow to an ailing economy hard hit by US sanctions in place since 1962 and a tourism dip brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The reforms under Diaz-Canel “have not meant a complete and comprehensive transition to a mixed economy” as most companies in Cuba are still state-controlled, analyst Arturo Lopez-Levy, of the Autonomous University of Madrid, told AFP.
