Cuba: the Castro era is expected to end by April

The end of the Castro era is approaching: Cuba's ruling Communist Party plans to hold its annual congress in April 2021, at which party leader Raúl Castro will retire from politics. The party congress will take place from April 16 to 19, as the party newspaper Granma wrote on Wednesday. In addition to the 89-year-old, other colleagues from the time of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara should also resign.

"This will be the Congress of Continuity, which will be expressed in the gradual and orderly handover of the main responsibilities of the country to the new generations," declared the vice-party leader José Ramón Machado Ventura, also a fighter of the 1959 revolution. He too will probably resign at the party congress.

Cuba's President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who succeeded Castro as head of state in 2018, is expected to take over the party leadership. A number of economic reforms were implemented under him, which were introduced under Raúl Castro since 2008. However, the socialist Caribbean state is suffering from an economic crisis that was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.

This is not the first time that Castro was said to be leaving power. The same happened in 2014 and 2018, and in both cases Castro said that the country would never leave its Socialist principles.

Source: Kleine Zeitung