Cuba’s new leadership will have to deliver results fast

ENSCONCED IN ITS island fastness 100 miles from Florida, Cuba’s communist regime has outlasted countless premature obituaries. All remained calm when Fidel Castro was taken ill in 2006 and handed over the reins to Raúl, his younger brother. It did, too, when Raúl turned the presidency over to Miguel Díaz-Canel, his hand-picked successor, in 2018. At a Congress of the ruling Communist Party on April 16th-19th Raúl also relinquished command of the party to Mr Díaz-Canel, a 61-year-old apparatchik. A new, slightly younger leadership has seamlessly taken over, under the slogan “unity and continuity”. Yet the fact that the party had to proclaim that nothing is changing suggests that beneath the surface it worries that things might.

For almost half a century Fidel ruled with communist dogma and erratic Caribbean charisma. Raúl set about tidying up the mess he inherited. He launched a cautious economic reform, under which some 600,000 of the workforce of 4.8m are self-employed or in co-operatives. He allowed Cubans to buy houses and mobile phones, and to use the internet. With Barack Obama he re-established diplomatic ties with the United States. He separated the roles of party and government and introduced term limits. The Congress completed this rationalisation. Raúl’s fellow gerontocrats have left the ruling politburo (though Raúl’s son and son-in-law hold powerful military jobs). José Ramón Machado Ventura, a Stalinist enforcer who was second secretary, has gone but not been replaced. That leaves Mr Díaz-Canel free to reshape the party’s ranks.