Is Cuba heading for a change!

Adriana Brasileiro

For the first time in over five decades, a leader without the last name Castro is expected to take the helm of Cuba’s ruling party as officials try to usher through a generational leadership change amid a crushing economic crisis.

Raul Castro is expected to step down as the Communist Party’s first secretary general, considered the most powerful political position on the island, during the organisation’s Eighth Congress, which is slated to begin on Friday.

The transition comes at Cuba’s most trying moment in years. The island is the throes of its worst economic contraction since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Painful economic reforms have sent inflation soaring. Long lines for food have again become common place. Trump-era sanctions have reduced access to vital economic lifelines like remittances. And a nascent but increasingly vocal social movement is channeling mounting frustration.

Though billed as “Congress of Continuity,” the Communist Party will be under pressure to accelerate the pace of economic reforms begun a decade ago.

“It’s not just a matter of putting a younger person in that position, it’s a matter of fundamentally changing the system. And there is pressure to do that from some factions, but there’s also a lot of resistance,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank based in Washington.

“It’s going to be an extremely interesting Congress because it happens in the context of the worst economic situation in 30 years.”

The Communist Party’s official agenda for the congress includes three key items: Castro’s replacement, which could involve a wider changing of the guard among the top brass after Castro himself said at the 2016 conference that Cuba’s leaders were “too old” and their terms should be limited; a review of economic policies and goals announced in the 2011 congress; and an analysis of the party’s political work.

The party’s 2011 congress was considered a landmark event with the announcement of over 300 economic reforms, including measures to encourage more private initiative and expand private property ownership. The reforms were considered the biggest shake-up to the island’s state-run socialist economy in decades.

But a decade later, many of the ideas introduced are barely getting off the ground. In January, the government did away with a confusing dual-currency system, eliminating an artificial hard currency called the CUC, or the Cuban convertible peso, and set the official exchange rate at 24 pesos to the dollar — a devaluation of 2,400 per cent. The changes set off a spike in inflation, with some prices rising as much as 500 per cent, for instance, in the case of electricity.

Salaries for state employees and pensioners and the minimum salary were raised to make up for the changes, but the price of food, medicine and other goods rose at a much higher pace. And the pay for some of the workforce and in the informal economy hasn’t increased. — dpa