Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel at the last Ibero-American Summit Mónica González Islas
Very soon, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel will celebrate his five-year term in office. A power underestimated by several currents of opinion, beneficial or detrimental to the island’s government. According to many, Díaz-Canel would be a puppet ruler of the historic generation or the hard core of Cuba’s military and political elite. He himself has confirmed that his mandate is characterized by continuity.
The recent general election paves the way for Díaz-Canel’s re-election, but they do so with various symptoms of falling in popularity. Compared to 2018, abstention increased from 14% to 24% and split or selective voting, ie not for all official candidates, from 19% to almost 28%. If we add to this the slight increase in blank or annulled votes, it is easy to conclude that while the National Assembly has maintained its monolithism, the public has shown dissatisfaction.
Díaz-Canel began governing shortly after Barack Obama’s trip to the island and the death of Fidel Castro in 2016. The political line that followed his mandate was drawn at the Seventh Congress of the Communist Party in April of the same year, slowing down the economic reforms promoted by Raúl Castro in previous years, which had facilitated the restoration of relations between the United States and Cuba.
Díaz-Canel came to power in the midst of a turn of counter-reform that alternated between curbing the non-state economic sector, increasing control of civil society, restarting the Bolivarian axis in Latin America, and attacking by the official media about “centrism” that is the name of the Cuban reformism of the Obama thaw. This shift, based on an official diagnosis of the “subversive” ability for diplomatic normalization with the United States, was the immediate legacy he received from Fidel Castro, the new President.
The counter-reformist line would very soon have the opportunity to manifest itself in the final draft of the 2019 Constitution, which omitted from the text many calls for political changes raised in citizens’ consultations, such as the direct election of the President of the Republic. Díaz-Canel himself, indirectly elected, eventually lobbied for a constitution far removed from the various transformative expectations of the majority of citizens.
Prior to the adoption of the constitutional text, the government promoted a number of decrees such as 349, 371 and the National Symbols Law that attempted to limit freedom of expression in public space, alternative media and social networks. The control offensive generated conflicts between the Ministry of Culture and the younger generation of Cuban artists, as illustrated by the harassment of the San Isidro movement and the November 27, 2020 protest in Vedado.
The travel and remittance restrictions enacted by Donald Trump’s new administration, added to blunders in Cuba’s economic policies like monetary and foreign exchange unification in early 2021, unleashed a perfect storm in the island society as the coronavirus pandemic spread in full. The shortages, shortages and soaring prices of basic commodities, fuel shortages and power outages contributed to a growing and widespread discontent that led to tens of thousands of Cubans taking to the streets to protest on July 11 and 12, 2021.
Díaz-Canel’s immediate reaction was to declare that “the order to fight had been given” and called on the “revolutionaries” to confront the “counter-revolutionaries” in the city squares. The social outburst was officially interpreted as an act of sedition embedded in an attempted coup promoted by the US government and the media and social networks of the Miami diaspora and the island’s opposition. Thousands of people were arrested in the months following July 11 and more than a thousand were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 30 years.
Amid the trials of the protesters, the Cuban state introduced a new penal code that increased the number of crimes for which a citizen could be sentenced to death to 24, and penalties for “attempted constitutional amendment” and for “external financing,” allegations accused by the media of opponents and activists without necessarily taking legal action.
In contrast to the penal code, a new family code, which makes the rights of same-sex couples more flexible and deepens the gender approach, was submitted to a referendum in late 2022, which was supported by more than 66% of respondents. The two codes, crime and family, fully portray the first five years of Díaz-Canel’s government: repression and control of civil society, limited advances in civil rights, and setbacks in economic and political freedoms.
In recent months, the world has seen outrage as hundreds of Nicaraguan opponents and activists have been released and deported. This type of exchange, exile prison, has been practiced in Cuba for decades. Arrested or prosecuted, like many of those who peacefully marched in the summer of 2021, they were forced to leave the island as part of the largest mass exodus in decades. About 270,000 Cubans immigrated to the United States in the past year alone.
If Cuba were a democracy, as Havana’s official press claims, these five years would be the central topic of debate in the island’s state media. In a few months, the president must be re-elected for another five years in the highest leadership of the Cuban state and later in that of the only communist party. That re-election be taken for granted after such a repressive and uninterrupted first five-year period could not be a better indication of the lack of democracy in the Caribbean nation.
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