Fidel Castro

Political structure
May 6th 2008
From the Economist Intelligence Unit
Source: Country Report

Official name

Republic of Cuba

Form of government

Centralised political system, with close identification between the PCC and the state

Head of state

The president, Raul Castro, took over from his brother, Fidel, on February 24th 2008

The executive

The Council of Ministers is the highest executive body; its Executive Committee is composed of the president, the first vice-president and the vice-presidents of the Council of Ministers

National legislature

National Assembly of People’s Power; 614 members elected by direct ballot; the Assembly meets twice a year, and extraordinary sessions can be called

Legal system

A People’s Supreme Court oversees a system of regional tribunals; the Supreme Court is accountable to the National Assembly

National elections

Provincial and national assemblies: last elections January 20th 2008; next elections due in January 2012. Municipal elections: last held October 2007; next due in April 2010

National government

The organs of the state and the PCC are closely entwined, and power devolves principally from the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers

Main political organisation

The Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) is the only legal political party

President of the councils of state & ministers: Raul Castro Ruz

First vice-president: Jose Ramon Machado Ventura

Vice-president: Carlos Lage Davila

President of the National Assembly: Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada

Key ministers

Agriculture: Maria del Carmen Perez

Armed forces: General Julio Casas Regueiro

Audit & control: Gladys Maria Bejerano Portela

Basic industry: Yadira Garcia Vera

Communications & informatics: Ramiro Valdes Menendez

Culture: Abel Prieto Jimenez

Economy & planning: Jose Luis Rodriguez Garcia

Education: Ana Elsa Velazquez

Finance & prices: Georgina Barreiro Fajardo

Foreign investment & economic co-operation: Marta Lomas Morales

Foreign relations: Felipe Perez Roque

Foreign trade: Raul de la Nuez Ramirez

Government: Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz

Justice: Maria Esther Reus Gonzalez

Labour & social security: Alfredo Morales Cartaya

Light industry: Estela Dominguez Ariosa

Public health: Jose Ramon Balaguer

Science, technology & the environment: Fernando Gonzalez Bermudez

Sugar: Ulises Rosales del Toro

Tourism: Manuel Marrero Cruz

Transport: Jorge Luis Sierra Cruz

Central Bank president

Francisco Soberon Valdes

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Americas Quarterly published by the Americas Society offers a preview of its Spring edition, and presents summaries of two articles on Cuba.

Cuba No Libre by Gary Marx and Cecilia Vaisman

On February 19th, Fidel Castro made it official: he was resigning the presidency and ending his 50-year reign over Cuba. Many exiles, U.S. officials and Cubans on the island had been waiting for this historic day, confident that it would not only mark a new beginning but signal that fundamental change was coming to the hemisphere’s only communist nation. Some experts predicted that Cubans, fed up with shortages and hardship, would rise up and demand freedom. Others suggested change would come from within the government—that a younger generation of leaders would ascend to the top and recognize that Cuba’s economic and political system was bankrupt and needed radical reform.

But what happened following Fidel’s announcement was the opposite. Rather than taking to the streets demanding change, Cubans are going about their daily lives—queuing for hours at bus stops, collecting monthly food rations at neighborhood bodegas, and showing up at government jobs—as if nothing unusual has happened. Rather than a new generation of leaders taking over, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother, was named Cuba’s new president, and a cadre of aging communist loyalists continue to dominate the leadership structure in the newly named Council of State, the nation’s top policy-making body.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once again urged the Cuban…

Frustration Mounts by Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat

If the new Cuban government has a remarkable resemblance to the old, that’s because they are one and the same. No real change has taken place in Cuba. Yet. The same group that accompanied Fidel and Raúl Castro since their days in the Sierra Maestra—all now senior citizens—remains firmly at the helm of government. They represent the quintessence of the Cuban military-industrial complex. Below them, however, lies an entity often observed but not very well understood: the Cuban people.

Recent polls by Gallup (2006) and the International Republican Institute (2007) indicate that a majority of Cubans are unhappy with their level of personal and economic freedom. Cubans increasingly cry out for greater personal autonomy, and that also includes questioning of the political structure. That unhappiness has largely been expressed in a withdrawal from the political involvement that has been crucial to the government’s ability to keep the population in check. According to the government’s own figures, over 1.4 million Cubans did not participate in the one-party, single-candidate electoral process that culminated with the selection of Raúl Castro as president this year. That’s a noteworthy decline from the 823,171 who absented themselves from the previous “elections” held in 2003. Considering that the Cuban government uses a wide array of persuasive and coercive measures to pressure citizens to participate, it is a highly significant figure.

But passive discontent is already changing into a more active mode…

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Via the Los Angeles Times:

 Cuba uses the dominant convertible peso known as the CUC — introduced four years ago to replace the U.S. dollar, which had been circulating for more than a decade — and the Cuban peso known as moneda nacional.  Those with jobs in hotels, airlines and shops and on the thriving black market earn CUCs, referred to as “the dollar” and worth about 25 times the peso. The peso is the currency given to all state workers and pensioners, which must be converted to CUCs to purchase most goods. The Cuban government retains the peso because it lacks sufficient foreign reserves to back and circulate only CUCs.  The U.S. dollar, which circulated in Cuba from the mid-1990s to late 2004, was removed by then-President Fidel Castro and now is subject to a 10% tax whenever it is converted to CUCs — in effect a devaluation by the state. The tax is felt most by tourists and the estimated 10% of Cuban households receiving money from relatives abroad.

[…]

The government of Raul Castro, the 76-year-old younger brother of the ailing Fidel Castro, has acknowledged since Raul was named president in February that the two-currency economy has produced social strains and a class divide. He has pledged to restore equality by reunifying Cuba’s monetary system. Many foreign economists, however, deem that impossible unless everyone is forced back to the dysfunctional system in which prices are arbitrarily fixed by the state and goods disappear from stores when their production cost exceeds what they can sell for.

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Economic data
May 6th 2008
From the Economist Intelligence Unit
Source: Country Data

• The Economist Intelligence Unit’s central forecast assumes that there will be no sudden rupture in the political system. The new president, Raul Castro, is under no immediate threat from the outlawed domestic opposition or from the US; there are no signs of ruptures within the government; and the population’s frustrations are focused mainly on economic hardships, which are slowly being relieved. Nevertheless, the departure of Fidel Castro has opened the way for a gradual shift in the political structure. Under Raul, authority will be less centralised, but we assume that the one-party system will remain.
• Relations with the current US administration will remain hostile, and US sanctions will remain intact. However, a gradual re-engagement is possible under the next US administration, which will take office in January 2009. This would require strong political will on both sides to overcome resistance based on ideology and vested interests, but if it occurred would herald new possibilities for both political and economic liberalisation. Even without full normalisation of relations, a relaxation of sanctions could result in an increase in bilateral economic relations by 2012.
• Economic policy is under review, and a reform process has begun that is likely to bring major changes in the coming year. Our forecast assumes that the state will continue to exercise substantial direct control, but reforms will expand the role of the market. The Banco Central de Cuba (BCC, the Central Bank) will play a pivotal role in a realignment of prices, wages and exchange rates, using a broad range of direct and indirect instruments. We forecast an increase in real wages in 2008 and a revaluation of the unofficial value of the Cuban peso in 2009. Both adjustments will serve to increase real consumer spending. The fiscal deficit (which is monetised) will widen in 2008 before moderating to 4% of GDP by 2012.
• We expect annual GDP growth (using the standard definition, not the Cuban accounting method) to decelerate after a surge since 2004 driven by new export markets and sources of external finance. With a stable population, an average GDP growth rate of around 5% in the forecast period will bring significant improvements in living standards. Higher consumer spending and state investment will provide momentum in the medium term. Close ties with China and Venezuela leave Cuba vulnerable to any reversal of fortune in those countries.

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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 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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