Cuban leaders criticize both bureaucracy and private sector
State media: Raul Castro retains top Communist Party post
(about 17 hours later)
HAVANA — Some of Cuba’s most powerful officials criticized the creaking inefficiency of its state-controlled economy on Monday but tarred its vibrant private sector as a potential source of U.S. subversion.
HAVANA — Raul Castro will hold the Cuban Communist Party’s highest post for another five years alongside his hardline second-in-command, state media reported Tuesday, in a resounding message that the island’s aging revolutionary leaders will retain control in the face of detente with the United States and widespread popular dissatisfaction with the country’s economic performance.
The comments illustrated the conundrum faced by a Cuban government simultaneously trying to modernize and maintain control in a new era of detente with Washington.
Government news sites said Castro, 84, would remain the party’s first secretary and Jose Ramon Machado Ventura would hold the post of second secretary for a second term. Castro currently is both president and first secretary. The decision means he will hold a position at least as powerful as the presidency even after stepping down from that post in 2018.
The Cuban Communist Party ended the third day of its twice-a-decade congress with a vote for the 114-member Central Committee, which in turn selects the powerful 15-member Political Bureau. The bureau’s first and second secretaries are the country’s top officials.
Machado Ventura, 85, is known as an enforcer of Communist orthodoxy and voice against some of the country’s biggest recent economic reforms.
Monday’s vote, like the rest of the congress, was open only to 1,000 delegates, 280 hand-selected guests and state journalists, whose reports revealed virtually no concrete details of the policies that will guide the government for the next five years.
Castro’s decision to remain in power alongside a man even he has criticized for rigidity capped a four-day meeting of the Communist Party notable for its secrecy and apparent lack of discussion about substantive new reforms to Cuba’s stagnant centrally planned economy. Even high-ranking government officials had speculated in the weeks leading up the Seventy Party Congress that Machado Ventura could be replaced by a younger face associated with free-market reforms started by Castro himself.
The Seventh Party Congress has been criticized for its extreme secrecy by ordinary Cubans and even members of the Communist Party itself. State media said the results of the voting would be revealed Tuesday.
The party congress also chose the powerful 15-member Political Bureau, mostly devoid of fresh faces associated with the party’s younger generations. Five members were new but none are high-profile advocates for reform.
Cuban President and First Party Secretary Raul Castro opened the meeting Saturday with a somber evaluation of the state of reforms he introduced after taking over from his ailing brother Fidel in 2008. Raul Castro blamed “an obsolete mentality” and “attitude of inertia” for the state’s failure to implement reforms meant to increase productivity.
A physician by training, Machado Ventura organized a network of rebel field hospitals and clinics in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the 1950s, participating in combat as both a medic and a fighter under Castro in the revolution against dictator Fulgencio Batista. After the revolution he became health minister and later assumed more political roles within the Communist Party. He also sat on the powerful Politburo starting in 1975.
First Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel, long seen as Castro’s successor, repeated that criticism of the bureaucracy in a speech Monday announcing the congress’ formal acceptance of Castro’s evaluation. He said obsolete ways of thinking led both to inertia in enacting reforms and “a lack of confidence in the future.”
Machado Ventura was vice president from Raul Castro’s ascent in 2008 until 2013, when the post was taken by Miguel Diaz-Canel, widely seen as the country’s likely next president. Machado Ventura was named second secretary in 2011 in a move seen as a way to placate and empower party hardliners.
“Along with other deficiencies, there’s a lack of readiness, high standards and control, and little foresight or initiative from sectors and bureaucrats in charge of making these goals a reality,” Diaz-Canel said in an excerpt of a speech broadcast on state television.
Machado Ventura was often employed by Raul Castro and his brother Fidel to impose order in areas seen as lacking discipline, most recently touring the country to crack down on private sellers of fruits, vegetables and other agricultural goods. While Raul Castro opened Cuba’s faltering agricultural economy to private enterprise, the government blames a new class of private farmers and produce merchants for a rise in prices.
However, lengthy state media reports on the four-day congress focused less on proposals for reform than on debates about political orthodoxy focusing on the need to protect Cuba’s socialist system from the threat of global capitalism and U.S. influence in particular.
Machado Ventura has been the public face of crackdown on what the government labels profiteering, but many outside economists say the problem is farms’ inability to meet demand due to continued state control of supplies of machinery, fertilizers and other inputs.
A month after President Barack Obama’s visit to Havana, the first by a U.S. president in nearly 90 years, Cuban leaders have begun to consistently portray his trip as an attempt to seduce ordinary Cubans into abandoning the country’s socialist values in favor of a desire for free markets and multiparty democracy.
“He’s demanding! He’s very demanding!” Castro said of his deputy in 2008. “To be sincere, sometimes I’ve said it personally, he doesn’t use the best techniques in being demanding.”
On Saturday, Castro said “the enemy” was targeting young people, intellectuals, the poor and the 500,000 members of Cuba’s new private sector as vulnerable to persuasion.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez went further, calling Obama’s visit “an attack on the foundation of our history, our culture and our symbols.”
“Obama came here to dazzle the non-state sector, as if he wasn’t the representative of big corporations but the defender of hot dog vendors, of small businesses in the United States, which he isn’t,” Rodriguez said.
Rene Gonzalez, a former intelligence agent held in the United States in a case resolved by the declaration of detente with Washington, made an unusual call for the consideration of political reform in Cuba.
Saying the party had focused excessively on the economy for 10 years, he said, “Let the party call for a broad public discussion that goes beyond concepts of economic development.”
“Let’s arrive at the eighth party congress for the first time in human history with a consensus on that human aspiration that some call democracy, and that’s possible through socialism,” Gonzalez said.
State media did not indicate whether his proposal was included in any of the formal documents put up for a vote during the congress.
Aged 55 and 58, respectively, Diaz-Canel and Rodriguez are members of the generation expected to move into the highest ranks of power in Cuba as early as Tuesday when the congress’ vote is announced.
Castro said Saturday that he was proposing an age limit of 60 for election to the Central Committee and 70 for lower-ranking but important posts in the party.
Castro is 84 and his second secretary, hardliner Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, is 85.
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Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mweissenstein
Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mweissenstein
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
