As my late father used to say, too many people don’t know the Castros. Or to translate, the Castros don’t change but they want you to think that they change.
Down in Cuba, we have a change, the new President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Let’s take a look:
1) Yes, it is historic, since the guy is not named Castro; and,
2) Yes, it is generational because Diaz-Canel was born in 1963 and is not a part of the Castro generation.
Bur real change? Not at all!
Diaz-Canel was handpicked by Raul Castro and subsequently “approved” by the one party Cuban assembly, as we see in this report:
He has been waiting in the wings since 2013 when Castro said that he would leave the Cuban presidency on Feb. 24, 2018 — later postponed to April 19 — and the rubber-stamp National Assembly named Díaz-Canel first vice president of the Council of State.“When Raúl Castro is the president, then yes, the president runs Cuba,” said Jaime Suchliki, a longtime Cuba watcher.“When Raúl Castro is not president, that will be a very different matter. Díaz-Canel has no tanks and no troops.”Díaz-Canel himself has solid party credentials. In 1997, he became the youngest member ever of the Politburo, the handpicked committee of 14 party members who function as Castro’s senior advisers.Yet if there’s still doubt about how much real power Castro is willing to cede, there’s a widespread consensus that the political and economic collapse of the government in Venezuela — Cuba’s staunch ally and longtime subsidies provider — means that the island must seek foreign investment and engage with other governments.And that, in return, will require at least some public-relations gestures to convince the outside world that Cuba is moving beyond a one-family state.
So what happens now? How impressed are foreign investors going to be with the “public relations gestures”?
Not very and especially not President Trump.
I call on President Trump to make the following announcement: We will end the embargo if Diaz-Canel calls for an open plebiscite to determine Cuba’s future, as Pinochet did in Chile.
Call Diaz-Canel’s bluff and let’s see how much he really wants to reform!
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
