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Update: Miguel Diaz-Canel, 57, selected as next president of Cuba

Published:Wednesday | April 18, 2018 | 2:01 PM
FILE - In this March 17, 2015 file photo, Cuba’s President Raul Castro listens to the playing of national anthems during his welcome ceremony at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela. On April 19, 2018 Raul Castro will step down as president after a decade in office. The world should expect no immediate radical change from a single-party system dedicated to stability above all else. Raul Castro will remain first secretary of the Communist Party, described by the Cuban constitution as the country’s “highest guiding force.” (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)

HAVANA (AP) — Cuba today selected 57-year-old First Vice President Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez as the sole candidate to succeed Raul Castro as president of Cuba, the centerpiece of an effort to ensure that the country’s single-party system outlasts the aging revolutionaries who created it.

The virtually certain unanimous approval of the National Assembly will install someone from outside the Castro family in the country’s highest government office for the first time in nearly six decades.

The 86-year-old Castro will remain head of the Communist Party, designated by the constitution as “the superior guiding force of society and the state.”

As a result, Castro is almost certain to remain the most powerful person in Cuba for the time being.

His departure from the presidency is nonetheless a symbolically charged moment for a country accustomed to 60 years of absolute rule first by revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and, for the last decade, his younger brother.

Facing biological reality, Raul Castro is working to ensure a smooth transition from him and his small group of former guerrillas to a new generation that can maintain the government’s grip on power in the face of economic stagnation, an aging population and waning revolutionary fervor among Cuban youth attuned more to global consumer culture than the anti-capitalist, nationalist messaging of the state-run media.

Most Cubans know their first vice president as an unremarkable speaker who initially assumed a public profile so low it was virtually nonexistent.

Until March, Diaz-Canel had said nothing to the Cuban people about the type of president he would be.

The white-haired, generally unsmiling Diaz-Canel had been seen at greatest length in a leaked video of a Communist Party meeting where he somberly pledged to shutter some independent media and labeled some European embassies as outposts of foreign subversion.

That image has begun to change slightly this year as Diaz-Canel stepped into the moderate limelight offered by Cuba’s Soviet-style state media.

With his public comments in March, many Cubans got a glimpse of him as a flesh-pressing local politician, an image familiar to residents of the central province where he was born and spent nine years in a role akin to a governor.

Castro entered the National Assembly just after 9 a.m. accompanied by a broadly smiling Diaz-Canel.

The 604 assembly members were sworn in — a 605th was absent — then voted for the president and vice president of the legislative body itself.

The result of the votes for president and vice presidents and other national leaders is expected to be officially announced Thursday, the anniversary of the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion defeated by Cuban forces in 1961.

As in Cuba’s legislative elections, all of the leaders being voted today are selected by a government-appointed commission.

Ballots offer only the option of approving or disapproving the official candidate.

Candidates generally receive more than 90 percent of the votes in their favour.

Fidel Castro was prime minister and president from 1959 until he fell ill in 2006.

Although Osvaldo Dorticos was president of Cuba during Fidel Castro’s time as prime minister, he was considered a figurehead beside the man who led Cuba’s revolution, forged its single-party socialist system and ruled by fiat.