Miguel Díaz-Canel

Miguel Díaz-Canel (born April 20, 1960, Villa Clara province, Cuba) is a Cuban politician who served as president of Cuba (2018– ) and secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba (2021– ). He was Raúl Castro’s handpicked successor for both positions. Born a year after the Cuban Revolution, a loyal, effective functionary who rose steadily through the ranks of the party, Díaz-Canel was the first person since the 1959 revolution not named Castro to hold either of the country’s leading posts.

The son of a factory worker and a schoolteacher, Díaz-Canel grew up in Villa Clara province, about 180 miles (290 km) east of Havana. He studied electrical engineering at Central University “Marta Abreu” of Las Villas in Santa Clara, graduating in 1982. That year he entered the army, in which he served until 1985. His military service included a stint in an antiaircraft missile unit as well as assignment to a detachment that provided personal security for both Raúl and Fidel Castro. Later, while teaching engineering at his alma mater, Díaz-Canel became active in the Young Communist League (Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas). In 1987, still in his mid-20s, he was appointed the Communist Party’s liaison to socialist-ruled Nicaragua, a crucial ally of Cuba. At age 33 he became second secretary of the Young Communist League.

In becoming the first secretary of the Communist Party in Villa Clara province in 1994, Díaz-Canel joined a select group of provincial party czars whose power and influence was growing as Cuba’s political system became increasingly pluralistic. He would later hold the same position in Holguín, the home province of the Castros. His ascendance came during Cuba’s “Special Period,” a time of extreme economic hardship brought about by the withdrawal of financial and material support from the Soviet Union as a result of its dissolution in 1991. With petroleum in short supply, Díaz-Canel gained attention for choosing to walk or ride a bicycle to work rather than be driven in the government-provided automobile to which he was entitled. Admirers pointed to this action as proof of his down-to-earth everyman qualities; skeptics characterized it as posturing compromised by the gasoline used by the vehicle-borne security detail that shadowed him.

The soft-spoken Díaz-Canel developed a reputation as a good listener and an accessible evenhanded public servant. An often-repeated anecdote describes how during an electrical blackout in Villa Clara, Díaz-Canel not only directed the effort to restore power but also went from bed to bed in the provincial hospital apologizing to the patients, including a political dissident who had landed in the hospital as a result of his anti-government hunger strike. Díaz-Canel’s long-standing support for a local LGBTQ nightclub was also frequently cited as a reflection of his supposedly liberal outlook.

In 1997 Díaz-Canel joined the 14-member Politburo, which functioned as Fidel Castro’s senior advisers. He was the youngest member of the body in its history. His tenure as a provincial party secretary came to an end in 2003. In 2009 Raúl Castro named him minister of higher education, which remained Díaz-Canel’s portfolio until March 2012, when he became one of eight vice presidents of the Council of Ministers, with responsibility for education, science, culture, and sports. The next year he was appointed to the Council of State and was elected its vice president in February 2013, becoming the first person born after the Cuban Revolution to hold that office. Among his high-profile (if largely ceremonial) assignments as vice president were representing the country at the funeral of Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez, one of Cuba’s essential allies, and meeting with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin in Moscow and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un in P’yŏngyang, as well as attending the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015.

Díaz-Canel represented a new generation of Cuban leadership that had not been forged by participation in the revolution. His style was markedly different from the aging revolutionaries who had dominated communist Cuba since its inception. In place of suits or fatigues, he sported open-collared guayabera shirts, jeans, and even Bermuda shorts. He wore his hair long and made no secret of his appreciation of rock music, especially the Beatles. An advocate for social and economic modernization and champion of increased Internet access for Cubans, Díaz-Canel often carried a computer tablet with him and maintained a personal Facebook page. His friends included musicians, artists, and other intellectuals. Two of his children have been members of a well-known Cuban rock group, Polaroid.

Yet for all of his seemingly forward-looking characteristics, Díaz-Canel also appeared to be a politician who was more than capable of adhering to the party line. Most notably, in 2017 a video surfaced in which Díaz-Canel, speaking to a group of party officials, castigated the United States and argued that Cuba was under no obligation to satisfy the terms of the reconciliation agreement reached with U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. In the video, Díaz-Canel also excoriated a Web site that he characterized as subversive and pledged to shut it down, regardless of potential accusations of censorship. Some observers felt the video had been leaked purposefully to establish Díaz-Canel’s bona fides as a hard-liner and to make him more palatable to conservative elements within the government.

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In any case, on April 19, 2018, when Raúl Castro stepped down as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, he was replaced by Díaz-Canel, whom Castro had anointed as his successor. (In 2019 the amended constitution transformed Díaz-Canel’s office to the president of the republic, while adding the post of prime minister to oversee the government’s day-to-day operation.) Castro retained the powerful office of secretary-general of the Communist Party. At age 57 Díaz-Canel was arguably on the doorstep of senior citizenship, but he was a babe in the woods compared with the typical high-level Cuban government official. Among the departures from tradition of the Díaz-Canel presidency was the public visibility of his (second) wife, Lis Cuesta, then director of academic services for the cultural tourism agency Paradiso. The appearance of spouses at the side of leaders had been denigrated as a convention of bourgeois politics by the Castros, whose wives were seldom seen in public, but Cuesta became a prominent presence who acted more like a first lady.

Although Raúl Castro had retained leadership of the party, he indicated that he planned to relinquish that position too in 2021. Despite the fact that the Cuban economy was reeling as a result of the reimposition of restrictions on U.S. travel to the island, disruptions to the supply of cheap petroleum from Venezuela, and especially the effects of the global coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Castro made good on his pledge and officially retired as secretary-general at the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in April 2021. Two days after Castro stepped down, he was replaced by Díaz-Canel.