By William M. LeoGrande*

The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) will convene its Eighth Congress on April 16‑19 to choose new leadership and assess policies intended to address longstanding economic and political challenges – with no indication of bold new departures. After all, Raúl Castro’s heir apparent as party leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has adopted as his favorite hashtag #SomosContinuidad. The meeting will have three major agenda items: selection of a new First Secretary to replace 89-year-old Raúl Castro and – perhaps – the replacement of other elderly party leaders; an assessment of progress implementing economic policies adopted at the Sixth Congress in 2011; and a review of the party’s political work, as mandated by the First National Party Conference in January 2012.

• The Cuban leadership is undergoing a generational transition from “los históricos,” who founded the revolutionary regime, to a new generation born after 1959. Castro has affirmed his intention to step down as First Secretary in favor of Díaz-Canel, who succeeded him as President in 2018. However, Castro has not publicly ruled out remaining a member of the Political Bureau, and neither have the four other veterans of the struggle against Batista on the 17-member body – including reputed conservatives Second Secretary José Machado Ventura and Ramiro Valdés. The generational transition will not be complete until they depart; it’s hard to imagine Díaz-Canel would truly be in charge if he is still surrounded by these powerful old-timers.

Pummeled by President Trump’s tightened sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic that closed the tourist industry, Cuba is suffering the worst economic crisis since the “Special Period” of the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. The central theme of the Party Congress will be an exhortation to the party faithful to go full speed ahead on economic reforms, overcoming the bureaucratic resistance that has impeded them until recently.

• When Raúl Castro introduced the reforms in 2011, he said it would take a decade to put them in place. Ten years later, they are far from finished, although the pace of reform has accelerated over the past nine months. The number of permitted private-sector occupations has increased from just over a hundred to more than 2,000. The dual currency and exchange rate system that created crippling distortions in the economy has been scrapped. And state enterprises have been put on notice that they have 12 months to become profitable or close their doors. In the short term, however, the economy remains hobbled by inefficiencies and unable to satisfy many basic needs.

The Congress will also review the party’s “political work” – the task of building public support for the government. In 2012, Raúl Castro criticized the party’s poor performance. Endless meetings degenerated into “formalism,” in which no real criticism was ever voiced and little was accomplished, thereby “spreading dissatisfaction and apathy” among the membership. These failings weakened the party’s ties to the broader public, for whom it seemed remote and inaccessible. Another indicator of the party’s tenuous standing was an 18 percent decline in membership from 2011 to 2016 – the first decline since the party was founded in 1965.

Cuba’s party congresses always convene on the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion – 60 years ago this April –  to commemorate Cuba’s successful defeat of Washington’s imperial designs. The focus of the upcoming Congress, however, will be on how the party can steer its way past the shoals of Cuba’s internal challenges and “update” its economic model of socialism through reforms that it nominally embraced years ago but has failed to fully carry out. With popular discontent at a peak because of the desperate economic situation and with critics mobilizing through social media to challenge state policy, the party has its work cut out for it.

April 5, 2021

* William M. LeoGrande is Professor of Government at American University.