Next week, Raul Castro will step down as president of Cuba after a decade in office. He took the position following his own brother Fidel’s long rule. It is widely expected that he will hand the position now to 57-year-old Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel. The handoff should take place on April 19.
The transition is noteworthy because it represents the shift of power from 60 years of Castros to a younger set of Cubans known as the “lost generation.”
Fidel and Raul Castro were scruffy young guerrillas in 1959 when they seized power of Cuba. They never relinquished it. Their revolution brought communism to the nation, shutting out much of the international trade, investment, and industry that had produced wealth for some there. The country was trapped in a 1950s time capsule technologically. Fidel passed in 2016 at age 90. Raul will step aside at age 86. As they and their fellow revolutionaries age, they cast a shadow deep and broad across Cuba’s society. The younger men and women who spent their lives executing the orders of the communist leadership now must prepare to emerge from that shadow to direct their country’s future.
Cuba remains locked in grinding economic stagnation. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans seek to emigrate in search of better lives. Change will require painful reforms before the situation improves. Even among the young adults who anticipate something new from the next generation of leaders, however, democratic reform and capitalist economic freedoms are not expected. The Communist Party will still be the controlling government. Raul Castro will remain first secretary of that party. Radical change is not likely.
Yassel Padron Kunakbaeva, a 27-year-old blogger, calls on the successors to offer “something new, going beyond what’s seemed like a great grayness until now.” But Kunakbaeva describes himself still as a Marxist—firmly lodging his hopes in the principles of communism.
Without a solid hope in Someone who truly is able to provide more than we might ask—and to write His perfect law on the hearts of those who seek Him—it’s difficult to imagine how this “lost generation” will improve life for its struggling people. Psalm 146 describes the God who saves—both souls and societies:
“Put not your trust in princes…in whom there is no salvation….Blessed is he…whose hope is in the Lord his God…who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.”
(AP Photo: Cuba’s First Vice President, Miguel Dias-Canel, stands at left beside President Raul Castro, right. Next week, Castro will step down as president. Diaz-Canel is expected to be his successor in the Communist Party.)
