Last week the Castro brothers announced the name of the man who, they said, will succeed Raul Castro when–or if–he retires at the end of the new five-year term as president to which he has just appointed himself.

The name is Miguel Diaz-Canel. He’s an apparatchik in the best Soviet style: thirty years in the Communist Party, starting with its youth groups. He’s not particularly well-known on or off the island, which may have recommended him to the Castros: previous heirs apparent sometimes got too big for their britches and had to be dumped. Of course, Canel may be dumped too, at any moment. He has no power base, and no apparent close ties with the Army and security services–who will be critical once the Castros are dead. The day Raul or Fidel is tired of him will be the day his “elevation” is undone. It will be interesting to see whether, in his new post as vice president, Canel is handed any real responsibilities by the Castros. This much is clear: nothing this man has ever done in his life suggests he believes in freedom, democracy, or human rights–or the Castros would never have selected him. Read more »

Democracy may be spreading in large parts of the world and with it genuine, contested elections–but not in Cuba.

Cubans “voted” again yesterday for the Cuban “National Assembly,” if one uses such terms very loosely. The Washington Post quotes Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez saying “It is a different electoral system. Personally I find it is more democratic than (others) I know.” This is offensive nonsense, because Cuba remains a one-party state where zero electoral competition is allowed. “Renouncing the principle of a single party would be equal to legalizing one or more imperialist parties,” Reuters reports Raul Castro saying last year. Read more »

Alan Gross begins his fourth year in a Cuban prison tomorrow, having been jailed on December 3, 2009.  The State Department issued a good statement:

Alan Gross is a former USAID contractor who has been in a Cuban jail since December 3, 2009.  The most recent reports are that he has lost 105 pounds while in prison, and may well be suffering from untreated cancer.

Vilma Rodriguez Castro is the granddaughter of Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and the man now running the communist dictatorship. Read more »

Cuba, tropical paradise. Harvard grads are invited to participate in a Harvard Alumni Association trip down there next year. But of course, this is a serious visit: no beaches, I guess. The Alumni Association describes the trip this way: Read more »

I’ve written here before about the Pope’s visit to Cuba and his disappointing silence about political repression there. Now we learn in the Miami Herald that his visit occasioned the detentions of 1,158 Cubans in the largest sweep in decades. Read more »

The views of my CFR colleague Julia Sweig on Cuba appear in an interview posted on our web site here under the title “The Frozen US-Cuba Relationship.”

Ms. Sweig sees massive changes occurring in Cuba under Raul Castro: “Raul holds the reins… and, domestically, the politics of implementing a fairly wide range of economic and political and social reforms are his priority. In a deal that was coordinated with the help of the Cuban Catholic Church and Spain, he released all of the political prisoners in Cuba. He also is taking a number of steps that imply a major rewriting of the social contract in Cuba to shrink the size of the state and give Cuban individuals more freedom–economically, especially, but also in terms of speech–than we’ve seen in the last fifty years.” Read more »

The president of Brazil has been visiting Cuba this week. It should not be necessary to remind anyone that Brazil itself lived for years under a military dictatorship, or that Cuba is one of the few remaining dictatorships in this hemisphere. It would have been reasonable to expect some slight sympathy or solidarity for the people of Cuba, especially when human rights abuses there are so awful. It is only a matter of days since the death of political prisoner Wilmar Villar at age 31. He had been jailed for the crime of paticipating in a demonstration. Such is life in Cuba. Read more »