Last September 25, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (Placetas, Cuba, 63 years old) left New York and landed at the same time at the facilities of the José Martí international airport and in the country with its biggest crisis since 1959. Some Weeks later, rested from the trip, he sat on the set that appears to be his mahogany-furnished office in the Palace of the Revolution next to the pro-government journalist Arleen Rodríguez Derivetin an interview thought out, rehearsed, edited and transmitted to the people of Cuba at night.
Díaz-Canel, who was born a year after the triumph of the Revolution and celebrated his first birthday the day after the Bay of Pigs Invasion ended, when Fidel Castro was 35 years old and Raúl Castro was 30, now looks different. In the five years since he became president, his hair has turned completely gray. The features of his face, which the Cuban Television makeup artists have tried to hide with foundation and concealers, look aged. He wears brown Oxford-style shoes, dark pants and a sky blue shirt, in keeping with his corresponding wardrobe, never military as Castro tradition dictates, but with lightly starched shirts, light guayaberas, straw hats or a cap.
There were those who thought that Díaz-Canel had an ace up his sleeve, that would change the future of Cuba. His schoolmates have told the state press that he tuned into the Beatles on a Philips radio, when English music was demonized in the country for “ideological reasons.” There is an old photo, in black and white, where he appears in a sweater and jeans tight, and with his then customary long hair down to the nape of his neck. Next to him, Fidel Castro in olive green. It was the beginning of the nineties, and electrical engineer Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, in his early 30s, descendant of Asturian immigrants, son of a factory worker and a school teacher, was rising through the ranks. the Union of Young Communists (UJC). In 1994 he became first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party in the province of Villa Clara, and began his firm step towards the hard politics of the country.
“Díaz Canel was a great leader here in the province,” says Jacqueline, 55, from the city of Santa Clara, where the ruler was born and developed much of his leadership career. “The people admired him a lot and they also followed him. “He did not admit that any company that produced food for the people stole from the people themselves.”
Many remember him riding a bicycle or supporting the shows at the local club El Mejunje, a meeting place for the LGBTIQ community that some communist leaders denigrated. Other residents of Villa Clara, however, detest him: “History is going to swallow him for abusing the people,” says a Cuban who asks to remain anonymous. “And in the end, not even he is responsible, he is one more of that litter.”
Beyond the few photos together, very little is known about the relationship between Díaz-Canel and Fidel Castro. The first has said that once, making use of his influence as a Party cadre in Santa Clara, he packed a square in a few hours for the second to give a speech. There he gained some sympathy from Castro. Another time they asked him how he had met Fidel and he said: “Since I can remember. Many years later he was my boss, but since I was a child I have known him and loved him,” he wrote on X —formerly Twitter— in 2021.
With Raúl Castro, 92, it is said that he had a closer relationship. They met at an event at the Villa Clara Defense School, when Díaz-Canel was secretary of the Provincial Committee of the UJC. In 2003, Raúl made him leader of the province of Holguín and promoted his candidacy to the Political Bureau of the Communist Party. In 2009, he placed the Ministry of Higher Education in his hands. In 2013, he became his successor by being named first vice president of the Councils of State and Ministers. And in 2018, when Castro left the presidency to remain in the position of general secretary of the party, he became president of the Republic of Cuba, at the age of 57. He is “not an upstart nor an improviser,” the youngest of the Castro brothers has said about Díaz-Canel.
Now, in his office, next to a portrait on the bookshelf in which he appears affectionate with his wife, Lis Cuesta, there is a photo of Fidel, who died two years before his rise to the presidency, the exact moment for the leader of the Cuban Revolution died at the age of 90 with the conviction that nothing, ever, no one other than him or his family would occupy the throne of the island.
Many Cubans have wondered for what purpose they broadcast the interview with Díaz-Canel now, and some respond that they want to “humanize” him, show that a president is also a person who gets tired, who makes mistakes, who rectifies them, who does not live blind But Díaz-Canel does not need an interview for this because he practices it daily. He is perhaps, unintentionally, the man who has contributed the most to the meme industry in the country. He always carries with him a tablet and boasts of having over 760,000 followers on X.
“I think I have more followers than anyone in Cuba, although I’m not sure,” he said in a recent interview with the newspaper The Nation. When asked if she preferred Oppenheimer either Barbie, said he was very interested in seeing Christopher Nolan’s film and little or nothing in Greta Gerwig’s. “I think Barbie “It is very, very light,” he said.
Díaz-Canel speaks slowly, he has declared himself a Barça fan and in 2021 he obtained the title of Doctor of Sciences. He is also the author of a phrase that has been a source of ridicule in Cuba: “Lemonade is the base of everything.” He uttered it when on one occasion he tried to publicly give alternatives to the food crisis in the country. He is also responsible for the word “conjuncture”, with which he called in 2019 the economic crisis that is worsening by the day. He has also been a booed president: they shouted him out of the Regla municipality, in Havana, when he went to appear after a tornado hit. They threw plastic water bottles at him in San Antonio de Los Baños when he came to quell the massive protests of July 11, 2021, and he will go down in history for having put more than 1,000 people behind bars for demonstrating, and having converted them, night to day, in political prisoners.
But who really is Díaz-Canel and what weight does he have in today’s Cuba with Raúl Castro, now without positions in the Communist Party, but whose shadow still extends throughout the island? Cuban historian and essayist Rafael Rojas maintains that his vision of Díaz-Canel’s leadership moves away from the rigidly subordinate or delegative vision that many have. “Díaz Canel occupies a new position, the presidency of the Republic, perhaps with more institutional powers than the former president of the Councils of State and Ministers. He is also the general secretary of the Party, which he may not fully control, just as he does not even partially control the army. But that position assures him supreme command in the next presidential succession, in 2028, when Raúl will probably be gone. After the 28th, he will remain as the party’s top leader, for a time, to control the transfer of executive power. “It’s not a little, in my opinion.”
Very little is known about what he may enjoy privately as president, perhaps some photos during a meal with friends, dancing at a private concert, or his trips in the armored BMW. Something more is known about his family life. He has two singing children from his marriage to Marta Villanueva, a dentist from Villa Clara. He is also a grandfather. Lis Cuesta, Díaz-Canel’s wife, is not a mysterious character like Dalia Soto del Valle, Fidel Castro’s widow, is to this day. Cuesta, known for her $17,000 Hermés handbags, her varied dresses and her penchant for good cooking, is not officially the country’s first lady but she behaves as if she were. A graduate of the Institute of Pedagogical Sciences of Holguín, she defines herself on social networks as coordinator of culture and tourism events of the Ministry of Culture, and as “grandmother, revolutionary and teacher.” Cuesta accompanies Díaz-Canel on his trips around the world. Since November 2021, she has visited about 21 countries with her husband, whom she constantly defends on social networks and professes a lot of affection for him publicly.
“He who is cute is cute! And, furthermore, inside and out: the dictator of my heart,” he once said on social networks about Díaz-Canel.
The last interview with Díaz-Canel, in his mahogany furniture office, also happened after the Cuban Ministers of Economy and Energy and Mines appeared on National Television to inform the people that what they are living is not a dream, and that there is effectively no fuel for transportation, nor for watching the soap opera, nor coffee for the mornings, nor food for the afternoons. Now the president has come to justify why the country has ended up in this “complex situation”, why there is so much inflation, why the so-called ordering task that was intended to guide the Cuban economy has not turned out to be what was thought, why to banking, why there is no fuel, why there are such low salaries and why people are leaving in droves.
The journalist, in order to throw an anchor at him from the beginning, tells him that he has not had it easy in his five years in office, which includes the crash of the Cubana de Aviación Boeing 737, an accident in which 112 people died; the coronavirus pandemic, and therefore, the impact on tourism; a tornado that destroyed several municipalities in Havana; the fall of the Saratoga hotel, which left 46 dead; the explosion at the Matanzas Supertanqueros base, where more than a dozen people were reported missing. So does the president believe he has been unlucky?
To the question, Díaz-Canel answers that it is not about luck. In his opinion and as always, it is about the US embargo and the crisis around the world. He talks about other things: about the need for “creative resistance”, about his policy against racism, towards women and against gender violence. He uses the word “revolutionary” and it seems like it would fall out of his mouth. Nobody in Cuba knows what it means to be a revolutionary anymore. Normally, Díaz-Canel uses words or phrases inherited from Castroism such as “change what must be changed,” or turn “setbacks into victories,” and no one understands what exactly he is referring to. In the last parliamentary elections in March, in which Castroism and not the people re-elected Díaz-Canel, the Government scored the worst electoral result in its history, with an abstention of 31.42%.
Rojas assures that it has been a constant in his leadership to combine “a discreet sympathy for economic openness with a continuous ideological and culturally conservative discourse.” He also considers that although there is probably an attempt on his part to please the reformist and immobile sectors of the leadership, “the consistency that he has shown in that line, in the last five years, speaks more of a rational choice, of which “We should not expect greater displacements even after the death of Raúl Castro.” The historian believes that Díaz-Canel would only move from that script if his power is threatened.
The Cuban president will be remembered for many reasons: it points to the largest exodus in the history of Cuba, the most depressed country in more than 60 years and the weight of being the heir of the Castros. While he searches for the formula to direct the course of the island and says that he will continue to support socialism, he maintains his daily walks of four or five kilometers, swims or does weight training on the weekends to stay in shape.
In 2018, Raúl Castro called Díaz-Canel “the only survivor.” Neither former foreign ministers Roberto Robaina or Felipe Pérez Roque, nor former vice president Carlos Lage had remained in charge. Faced with the idea of some that the future of Cuba would change, the country is today collapsed. Gone are the days when Raúl Castro sat down to talk with Barack Obama and injected a breath of fresh air into the economy.
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