Cuban helm to open, but clout in doubt

If 55-year-old ascends, Castros close by

Cuban President Raul Castro (left) and heir-apparent Miguel Diaz-Canel attend a twice-annual legislative session at the National Assembly in Havana in December 2014.
Cuban President Raul Castro (left) and heir-apparent Miguel Diaz-Canel attend a twice-annual legislative session at the National Assembly in Havana in December 2014.

When President Barack Obama visits Cuba next month, he will certainly be photographed with Raul Castro, whose 84-year-old face bears the lines left by the nearly six decades he and his brother, Fidel, have ruled the island. What will be interesting to see is whether another Cuban official will be included in the pictures.

Miguel Diaz-Canel is supposedly the face of Cuba's future. Raul Castro signaled as much in 2013, when he said he would leave the Cuban presidency on Feb. 24, 2018 -- and then the rubber-stamp National Assembly named Diaz-Canel first vice president of the Council of State.

"Comrade Diaz-Canel is not an upstart nor improvised," Raul Castro said. The appointment to Cuba's second-highest political position put Diaz-Canel on track to become Cuba's head of state. Castro stopped short of proclaiming that Diaz-Canel would succeed him as president, but the intent seemed clear. Castro was first vice president when he took over the presidency from his ailing brother in 2008.

A meeting with Obama would be the strongest indication yet that the 55-year-old Diaz-Canel will defy the lessons of Cuban history books. Those are littered with the names of men who were expected to one day replace the Castros and instead found themselves in internal exile or worse.

And if Diaz-Canel does become president, what does that really mean in a Marxist dictatorship run not by voters but by the military and the Communist Party?

"When Raul Castro is the president, then, yes, the president runs Cuba," said Jaime Suchliki, director of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. "When Raul Castro is not president, that will be a very different matter. Diaz-Canel has no tanks and no troops."

Virtually everyone who tries to read signals from Cuba's secretive political institutions agrees that big change is coming at the hands of the Castros' most inexorable opposition, the calendar. The men who fought the revolution are mostly well into their 80s, dead or, like Raul's 89-year-old brother, Fidel, sidelined by the infirmities of age.

Though Raul Castro promised in 2013 to leave the presidency, he said nothing about resigning as head of the Cuban armed forces and the Communist Party.

"It's a very powerful position -- perhaps the most powerful in the country," said University of California at San Diego political science professor Richard Feinberg of Raul Castro's role as chief of the Communist Party, noting that both Castros held the job simultaneously with their presidencies.

"Maybe the idea to put some separation between the party and the state will start to have legs. They have been talking about this concept for a long time, but it is very difficult to separate the two in a communist system. It's not clear how such an unraveling would happen."

Diaz-Canel has solid party credentials. In 1997, he became the youngest member ever of the Politburo, the committee of 14 party members who function as Raul Castro's senior advisers.

Yet if there's still doubt about how much real power the Castros are willing to cede, there is widespread consensus that the political and economic collapse of Cuba's benefactor Venezuela means that the island must seek foreign investment and engage with other governments. And that will require at least some public-relations gestures to convince the outside world that Cuba is moving beyond a one-family state.

Physical appearance is not the only sign of the three decades of age separating the Castros from Diaz-Canel. He dresses in jeans and sports jackets, not military fatigues. He sings along to rock 'n' roll songs. He carries a tablet computer under his arm and is on Facebook.

Two months from his 56th birthday, Diaz-Canel is on the last lap of middle age. Yet he represents youth in a Cuban leadership of octogenarians.

"We're talking about a generational succession, not a simple succession," said Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban diplomat and academic who lives in Havana.

Cuban dissident Ailer Gonzalez said the signs of a calculated generational change are everywhere on the island.

"They are showing on the Mesa Redonda TV show documentaries glorifying the lives of old military generals, humanizing the lives of members of the elite," Gonzalez said. "It seems a sort of goodbye, in order to promote younger people willing to continue defending the regime."

The Castro brothers have made tentative stabs at establishing a younger generation of leaders before, but have always pulled back. Carlos Lage, a former vice president, and two foreign ministers -- Felipe Perez Roque and Roberto Robaina -- were all thought to be heirs to the Cuban leadership, but each was discarded for showing signs of unseemly ambition.

Diaz-Canel, an electrical engineer by training and a career bureaucrat, has been careful to avoid self-promotion. He forged strong bonds with the Castros during a youthful stint in military service that -- according to a former military man who served in a similar unit -- included time in a detachment that provided personal security to Fidel and Raul Castro.

Diaz-Canel soon received a series of important appointments in the government and the Communist Party. After making his mark in the Union of Young Communists, he was only in his mid-20s when he was appointed the party's liaison to Nicaragua -- Cuba's key ally in the Western Hemisphere -- in 1987.

His career since has alternated between senior managerial posts, including minister of higher education, and increasingly important party jobs. From 1994-2003, he was one of a small, influential group of regional party chiefs, first in central Cuba's Villa Clara province, and then in Holguin province in the country's east.

"They are virtual czars at the level of the provinces, but they don't have that much exposure to western media," former intelligence analyst Lopez Levy said of the provincial party secretaries. "These provincial party czars are major players in the evolving new political system that's more pluralistic, if not more democratic. ... He stood out among the party czars."

The common people Diaz-Canel liked to chat up certainly included women. Diaz-Canel is consistently described by acquaintances as "lucky" in romance, with a series of attractive female companions. At some point he married Lis Cuesta, a tourism official, who is frequently photographed with him at official events -- a notable change from the treatment of Fidel Castro's marriage, which was practically a state secret during his years in power.

Diaz-Canel is an avid reader of the country's tightly controlled newspapers. He often invited reporters along on his trips into the countryside and sometimes called them with story suggestions. In Villa Clara, he hosted a radio show. His interest extended beyond journalism to the arts. He promoted rock festivals and art shows when many party officials still regarded such events as degenerate and possibly subversive.

But he was also careful to keep his patrons satisfied. Once, when Fidel Castro announced early in the morning that he was making a surprise visit to the city of Santa Clara, Diaz-Canel was able to fill the city's Revolutionary Square with cheering throngs by the time the leader arrived in the afternoon.

Diaz-Canel has continued his adroit footwork since his appointment as Cuba's top vice president in 2013. His speeches, laden with Marxist jargon and revolutionary slogans, rarely break new ground. Even his cautious criticism of government press censorship -- "secretismo," he called it -- wasn't made until Raul Castro raised the same subject. But they inevitably contain frequent praise of the Castros. In a 2014 speech in Mexico City, he mentioned them five times.

Though the Castros have yanked the rugs from under heirs-apparent before, doing so in the case of Diaz-Canel would be a startling retreat. Over the past three years, he has crisscrossed not only Cuba but also the world as an emblem of Cuba's new political direction. From a climate-change summit in Paris to an encounter in Pyongyang with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, he has trekked through the world's power centers and political backwaters alike, logging time with foreign leaders.

Oddly, Diaz-Canel has been much less accessible to foreign diplomats in Havana, where the pace of normalization of relations with the United States over the past two years left much of the government disconcerted and apparently without guidance to proceed.

Diaz-Canel also seemed to be off-limits to U.S. officials until last year, when suddenly he became available for chats with American congressmen who visited Cuba after the announcement that Washington and Havana were re-establishing diplomatic relations.

If Diaz-Canel does become Cuba's leader, even his most optimistic supporters do not expect him to strike a radically different course for Cuba. "Will he move toward the market economy? I would say yes," said Levy, whose mother was one of Diaz-Canel's university professors. "Will he dismantle the one-party system? I don't think so. Everyone knows that a political opening in the current context is suicide."

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