The Cuban Communist Party is considering reforms this weekend that could impose term limits on its leaders in what would be a striking change in a country that former Cuban president Fidel Castro ruled for 49 years and was succeeded by his brother.
Cuban President Raul Castro said in an April Cuban Communist Party congress that this conference, which started yesterday and is the first in the party’s history, would consider limiting Cuban leaders to two five-year terms.
The party has said it was also pondering age limits for high--ranking officials as it tries to bring younger people into its aging leadership.
PHOTO: AFP
Raul Castro is 80, Cuban Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura is 81 and Fidel Castro, now mostly retired, but still present behind the scenes, is 85. The younger Castro succeeded his elder brother in February 2008 after 49 years as Cuba’s defense minister.
Raul Castro said at the April event that the country’s leaders had not done enough to find younger successors and said they had botched it when they tried.
He and other government officials are in a race against time to secure the gains of the revolution that put Fidel Castro in power in 1959.
Before they become too decrepit or die, they want to find replacements they consider loyal to the idea of keeping Cuba one of the world’s last communist countries.
It has been speculated the party might put some new faces on display at the conference.
Arturo Lopez-Levy, a Cuba expert at the University of Denver, said that term limits would have “democratizing effects” for the country.
“It creates a promise of an inter-generational changing of the guard with stability, since it reduces the possibilities of excessive accumulation of personal power and limits the advantages of the heads of state versus those individuals with different ideas,” he said in an e-mail. “It implies the airing of new ideas inside the system, while reducing the traumas of the retirement of older cadres.”
The party conference comes amid economic reforms that have given Cubans the right to open small businesses and to buy and sell cars, but have not yet included political changes.
The Communist Party is the only legal political party in Cuba and, under a national constitution in effect since 1976, the supreme guiding force of society and state.
Raul Castro has said the party should be more separate from the government and that steps toward that would be considered at the conference.
After building up expectations with his comments in April, Raul Castro tried to lower them in a recent chat with journalists, telling them there was no reason for “so many illusions with the conference, nor to raise expectations.”
However, his daughter Mariela Castro said this week that opening up the political process was important to maintaining the Cuban system.
“Everything that facilitates processes of participation and renewal, but above all wide involvement of the population in the taking of political decisions, is what will guarantee socialism in Cuba,” she said.
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
FLYBY: The object, appears to be traveling more than 60 kilometers per second, meaning it is not bound by the sun’s orbit, astronomers studying 3I/Atlas said Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of an interstellar object racing through the solar system — only the third-ever spotted, although scientists suspect many more might slip past unnoticed. The visitor from the stars, designated 3I/Atlas, is likely the largest yet detected, and has been classified as a comet, or cosmic snowball. “It looks kind of fuzzy,” said Peter Veres, an astronomer with the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which was responsible for the official confirmation. “It seems that there is some gas around it, and I think one or two telescopes reported a very short tail.” Originally known as A11pl3Z before