Cuba’s National Assembly on Wednesday ratified Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel for a new five-year term, in a decision to maintain continuity as the country faces a deep economic crisis.
More than 400 representatives to the assembly who were ratified by voters last month took office early on Wednesday and then convened the chamber to elect the government’s leadership and the president. Diaz-Canel obtained the votes of 459 of the 462 legislators present.
Cuban Vice President Salvador Valdes Mesa was also ratified, by 439 votes.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In his new term, Diaz-Canel must deal with a severe recession prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, soaring inflation triggered by a series of financial policy decisions and strict sanctions imposed by the US.
He must also grapple with discontent among many Cubans expressed in part through record rates of emigration to the US and elsewhere.
Among the measures his team would be focusing on “immediately,” Diaz-Canel said, are food production, an increase in exports and the development of “socialist-state enterprise.”
He added that controlling inflation is a priority in the country’s “economic battle.”
Diaz-Canel, a slow-talking, gray-haired former engineer who turns 63 this week, also heads the Communist Party of Cuba.
In 2018, he became Cuba’s first leader in six decades not surnamed Castro, after former Cuban president Raul Castro went into semi-retirement following his stint as president. He had taken over from his brother, Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, in 2016.
The country had “hopes of political and economic changes” at the time, but Diaz-Canel instead has become the standard-bearer of continuity, said Luis Carlos Battista, a Cuban-American analyst and lawyer living in Washington.
“The president, five years after being ratified by the National Assembly, has not yet managed to convey to the public an idea of progress,” Battista said.
In recent years, the economy has collapsed, with GDP falling 11 percent in 2020 after the pandemic struck. Inflation from January to October of last year was 40 percent at official rates — and even more when the black market is taken into account.
In July 2021, Diaz-Canel faced the country’s first major wave of protests in at least two decades, which left one dead, stores vandalized and vehicles destroyed, and which the government accused groups in the US of fomenting.
Cuba saw about 330,000 citizens leave for the US between October 2021 and December last year, a record number. Others departed for other countries in Latin America and Europe.
“The panorama is quite bleak,” said Michael Shifter, a member of the Inter-American Dialogue organization and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.
He said the president’s “main challenge will be to activate the economy.”
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