April 2008

Via Washington Post:

Cuba will convene a Communist Party congress next year to establish guidelines, including for “when the historic generations are no longer around,” President Raúl Castro announced Monday.

The congress, Cuba’s sixth and the first since 1997, follows a series of minor social changes Castro has decreed to make life easier and less restrictive for ordinary Cubans.

“We have worked hard in these past few months,” the president said during a Central Committee gathering in Havana, aired on state television.

The congress is likely to replace some officials of the 25-member party Politburo, and it could replace Fidel Castro as head of the party. Fidel Castro, 81, has not been seen in public since July 2006, and he stepped down as Cuba’s president in February.

Raúl Castro also announced that he had commuted death sentences for several inmates but added that capital punishment would remain on the books.

According to Granma — before the end of the VI Plenary of the Cuban Communist Party held yesterday — Raul Castro announced the proposal by the Politburo to celebrate the VI Party Congress in the final months of 2009. Full text of his speech in Spanish can be read here.

Also announced:

• Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdes, Salvador Valdes Mesa, and Army Corps General Alvaro Lopez Miera have been elected as members of the Politburo;

• José Ramón Fernández Álvarez (Vice-President, Council of Minister) and member of the revolutionary old guard will “attend, control, and coordinate”work on education;

• Commute death sentence of several prisoners to a life sentence;

• Politburo’s proposal to establish a Commission, with a reduced number of participants, to make more operational and functional the decision making process, which requires rapid attention and at the same time, permit a collective evaluation. The Commission will be comprised of Raúl Castro Ruz, José Ramón Machado Ventura, Juan Almeida Bosque, Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, Carlos Lage Dávila, Esteban Lazo Hernández y Julio Casas Regueiro, whom coincide with the president, first vice-president, and the vice-presidents of the Council of State;

• Plenary ratified the Politburo’s proposal to perfect Cadres Commission of the Central Committee of the Party as an instrument to fortify the control over the application of policy;

• Plenary also agreed to create seven permanent commissions subordinate to the Politburo, operationally overseen by the Central Committee Secretariat and presided in all cases by its secretary.

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Via LA Times:

In a campaign that bears much similarity to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1980s appeal for glasnost, Cuba’s President Raul Castro has been urging the public to investigate social shortcomings, denounce them and propose improvements.

And in concessions to allow Cubans some access to 21st century technology, Castro’s government recently announced the lifting of bans on cellphones and personal computers.

Cuban intellectuals and common folk are embracing the straight-talk notion, as did Russians 20 years ago. But here, as in the Soviet Union, the leadership is walking a tightrope, risking the collapse of a struggling, authoritarian system by granting long-denied freedoms.

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Via CIA:

Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments: Cuba

Date of Information: 4/22/2008

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Via Fortune:

After Fidel Castro announced that he was resigning the presidency of Cuba on Feb. 19, shares of OfficeMax rose 12%. The reason? It has a claim worth $2.5 billion dating back to when its property there was seized in the wake of the 1959 revolution. Similar claims made by nearly 6,000 companies are currently valued at $20 billion, and U.S. laws require all claims to be settled before trade can be normalized.

U.S. companies are not looking for a check, however, according to Patrick Borchers, an international-law professor at Creighton University, who studied the issue for USAID: “[They want] assets back or replacement assets or development rights.”

While the office-supply chain, OfficeMax, no. 288 on the 500 list, was never in business in Cuba, it came to own Cuba’s national electric company through a merger with papermaker Boise Cascade. Boise had earlier bought a Florida company with a stake in Cuban Electric.

Other claimants paint a picture of pre-Castro consumer life: Colgate-Palmolive, maker of the island’s most popular toothpaste;Coca-Cola, whose soda machines were ubiquitous; and GM, maker of the ’50s-vintage cars still being driven around the island. A predecessor of Exxon Mobil owned an oil refinery, and Chiquita Brands bought a firm that owned fruit orchards.

One company that’s been particularly interested in updating its claims is Starwood Hotels. In 1998 the global hotel group acquired part of a claim worth $1.4 billion when it bought a piece of the ITT conglomerate, which had owned a radio station in Cuba. Then, in 2005, after a former ITT manager in Cuba contacted the company, Starwood asked the Justice Department to recognize an additional claim of $51 million worth of land near the Havana airport and on the ocean. It was approved in 2006, but don’t book your room yet.

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Fidel Castro has written his latest reflection titled: “The Living and the Dead.” The Maximum Leader turned op-ed writer acknowledged recently sacked Education Minister Luis Ignacio Gómez Guriérrez as “truly exhausted” and “losing energy and revolutionary conscience.” While referencing his numerous travels abroad on behalf of Cuban education, Fidel chastised him for previous speeches whereby he took “personal accomplishment” instead of “extolling a body of work that was the authentic product of numerous revolutionary cadres.”

Fidel mentions the selection process of his replacement Ena Elsa Velázquez Cobiella, who was among the list of fifteen candidates.

However, further along his reflection, a cryptic passage summons the following:

“When I had the privilege of also being consulted on the eve of the election of the Council of State, I did not hesitate in proposing that prestigious military leaders –who brought our heroic people glory and moral authority– such as Leopoldo Cintras Frías and Álvaro López Miera, who are mature, modest, brimming with experience and energy, younger than the military officer who is one of the strongest and most threatening candidates for the leadership of the empire, should be proposed to the National Assembly as candidates for membership in the Council of State. I know other cadres, quite a bit younger than they are, highly qualified, with excellent training and not very publicized, people whom we must consider.”

Is this tacit acknowledgment that those generals selected to the Council of State where chosen because they are loyal acolytes of Raul Castro and the younger generation of capable officers were passed over?

Moreover, does this cryptic passage alert us to a discontent by officers, and that future and careful consideration by Raul’s regime should be made to advance the younger generation within the officer corps to quell such discontent?

Something worth pondering about the state of internal cohesion of the armed forces.

[H/T: La Nueva Cuba.]

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The Center for Defense Information Studies - CDIS (Centro de Estudios de Información de la Defensa - CEID) is holding in Havana its first international conference on Security and Defense, which began on April 21, and concludes today.

CEID is an academic entity independent from the Cuban military apparatus that operates under the similar status of a non-governmental organization (NGO) and was designed to establish an open communication with the US military. The Center was first headed by Div. Gen. Jesus Bermudez Cutiño, former Chief of Cuban Military Intelligence.

The conference, according to its call for papers/presentations website, will have as intention to examine with the highest scientific rigor, diverse subjects of great interest to the Security and Defense in the international, regional and national levels, in order to look for agile formulas and proposals to face and to solve the serious problems that threaten the same subsistence of the countries, regions and Humanity.

Among the topics of discussion are: Security and Defense in America, War and Peace, actual and perspective status of the theoretic studies on Security and Defense at worldwide scale, and global problems for Humanity.

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Via Prensa Latina:

Cuba’s Council of State, on a proposal of the Politburo, has appointed Ana Elsa Velazquez Cobiella as new Education Minister, an official note reports Tuesday. Velazquez substitutes Luis Ignacio Gomez Gutierrez. Before her appointment, she was head of the Frank Pais Higher Pedagogical Institute in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba.

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