Castro Firms Plans to Limit Cuba Terms, Even His
After his brother led Cuba for almost five decades, President Raul Castro announced at a Cuban Communist Party event Sunday that political terms would be limited to 10 years -- even his own.
"We can begin implementing this slowly without waiting for a constitutional reform" that is legally necessary, the president, 80, told the special conference trying to re-energize a party that has run the island uncontested for five decades, but is under mounting pressure to boost the pace of change.
President Castro, the ex-defense chief, has led Cuba since revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, now 85, stepped aside during a 2006 health crisis.
Though Raul Castro had announced plans for term limits in April 2011, making it all official still was an eye-opener in a country that was led by Fidel Castro for so many years.
The idea is meant to help jumpstart a younger generation of communist leaders to whom revolutionary elders want leave the Americas' only one-party regime, to project it years into the future. Currently Cuba has no designated political heirs for when the older generation is no longer alive.
The conclave was supposed to make decisions on nearly 100 proposals, including calls to open party leadership to more youths, women and blacks and to allow gays to serve openly in government, the party and the military.
Though the United States has pushed the neighboring nation, year in and year out, to open up politically, decades of a U.S. economic embargo have borne no fruit.
The president, in his address, underscored that Cuba was under siege by its enemies and ruled out any multiparty system.
"Abandoning the one-party principle simply would amount to simply legalizing the U.S. party or parties, on our soil," he stressed. "We are defending the one-party system against demagoguery and politics-for-pay," Castro told party faithful.
Raul Castro became president in 2008 after Fidel became ill, and only last year assumed the leadership of the Communist Party from his brother.
There are 800,000 registered members of the party in a country with 11.2 million people.
Castro, who has criticized the party's "bureaucratic methods," is also seeking to separate it from the government, convinced that party meddling has undermined the government's work. And he reiterated oft-repeated plans for a major crusade against corruption.
Raul Castro convened it because last year's VI Party Congress was devoted entirely to proposals to reform and modernizes the island's Soviet-style economic system, which has been mired in crisis since the Soviet Union's collapse.
Under the reforms, Cubans have been allowed to open small businesses, and buy and sell houses and automobiles on the private market for the first time, which also aim to reduce the size of state-run bureaucracies.