Raúl Castro

Raúl Castro (born June 3, 1931, Holguín province, Cuba) is the head of state of Cuba (acting president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, 2006–08; president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, 2008–18), defense minister (1959–2006), and revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the 26th of July Movement, which brought his brother Fidel Castro to power in 1959.

The youngest of three brothers, Raúl Castro was born to a Spanish father and a Cuban mother. He embraced socialism as a young adult and belonged to a communist youth group. Raúl participated with Fidel in the 1953 attack on Cuba’s Moncada Barracks, an unsuccessful attempt to unseat dictator Fulgencio Batista; the brothers spent nearly two years in prison for the assault until they were pardoned by Batista in 1955. In 1956 Raúl joined Fidel in launching the revolution that resulted in Fidel’s becoming premier in February 1959. That same year Raúl married fellow revolutionary Vilma Espín Guillois.

Over the ensuing decades, Raúl emerged as a key figure in his own right, and he enjoyed the strong support and loyalty of top military officers, known as raulistas. He remained deeply committed to the political primacy of the Communist Party of Cuba, which he helped develop and institutionalize. He also forged strong links with the Soviet Union and traveled there in 1962 to seek arms for Cuba’s armed forces. An avowed Marxist, Raúl nevertheless demonstrated greater interest in economic reform than his elder brother did. In the mid-1980s he allowed the Cuban army to experiment with reforms in several state-owned enterprises controlled by the military. The positive results gave him ample evidence to argue for greater reform when the collapse of Soviet subsidies provoked an economic crisis on the island. Thought to be the more traditional communist of the two Castro brothers, Raúl supported many of the economic and agricultural reforms that helped to partially revive the failing Cuban economy in the mid-1990s.

Because of Raúl’s long tenure as defense minister, his influence in Cuba far exceeded that of other ministers. On July 31, 2006, he was named provisional head of state so that Fidel could recover from surgery for a serious intestinal illness. In his new position, Raúl pledged to resolve Cuba’s problems under the banner of the Communist Party. His government in September 2006 hosted more than 50 heads of state at the meeting in Havana of the Non-Aligned Movement, but Cuba kept a relatively low international profile after that summit. Though Raúl signaled that he would be willing to engage in dialogue with the United States to resolve a bilateral dispute, he declined to meet with a 10-member delegation of U.S. congressional leaders who traveled to Cuba in December 2006 in hopes of conferring with him. Despite efforts to divine his intentions, Raúl remained an impassive and inscrutable figure, though the death of his wife—fellow rebel fighter who helped bring the Castro brothers to power, first lady of the Cuban Revolution, and women’s rights activist—in June 2007 likely had a profound impact on him.

Raúl had long occupied the number two position in the three principal bodies of the Cuban hierarchy—the Council of State, the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of Cuba—and in 2007 he became the acting head of all three governmental organizations. Cuba’s National Assembly officially selected Raúl as Cuba’s new president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers in February 2008, after Fidel announced that he would not accept another presidential term because of health problems. Upon taking office, Raúl said he would continue to consult his brother on pivotal state issues. During his first few months as the leader of Cuba, Raúl implemented various reforms, most notably the removal of wage restraints that had been in place in Cuba since the early 1960s. Other reforms included allowing Cubans to purchase cellular phones and personal computers, as well as to stay at hotels formerly reserved for foreigners. In September 2010 Raúl went even farther when he declared increased official toleration of private enterprise and announced that some 500,000 government employees would be laid off. In 2011 he succeeded Fidel as secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba. In August of that year Raúl oversaw the introduction of still more reforms, including a significant reduction in the role of the state in several important economic sectors, yet another round of massive layoffs of government workers, and the removal of a number of travel restrictions.

In 2012 Raúl declared that “the members of the generation who made the revolution have had the historic privilege of correcting the errors that they themselves have made.” Upon his election to another term as president in February 2013, he announced that he would be stepping down from that office at the end of the term in 2018. In the meantime, he continued to oversee broad changes to the Cuban system that were designed to provide short-term economic relief and meet long-range political goals.

Among the most important reform measures Raúl introduced was the liberalization of restrictions regulating Cuban travel abroad. The long-standing requirement of obtaining official authorization for foreign travel was suspended, as was the requirement of a letter of invitation from a person or an institution abroad. The new terms of travel also increased the maximum length of time residents could remain away from the island to two years—or longer. Moreover, expatriate Cubans could return to the island and reside for periods as long as three months at a time.

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Enabling Cubans to take up temporary residence abroad to obtain employment generated a new stream of foreign exchange for the country, and remittances (which originated largely from Cuban American communities) developed into one of Cuba’s principal sources of hard currency. Raúl’s economic reforms continued to enlarge the scope of the country’s increasingly mixed economy, with the number of state-operated enterprises that were transferred to private ownership growing markedly.

Raúl began to advance political reforms cautiously, and, by the July 2013 arrival of the 60th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada Barracks, the long-awaited generational transition within the leadership of the Communist Party and government appeared to have commenced. In his speech commemorating the anniversary, Raúl acknowledged that more than 70 percent of the Cuban population had been born after the triumph of the revolution. He noted that the “Historic Generation” of men and women who had participated in the toppling of the Batista government in 1959 was “yielding to the new [generation] with tranquility and serene confidence, based on [its] preparation and demonstrated capacity to uphold the banners of the Revolution and Socialism.” Among the most-notable personnel changes was the appointment of 52-year-old Miguel Díaz-Canel to replace the 82-year-old José Ramón Machado Ventura as first vice president, the designated successor to Raúl.

A handshake between Raúl and U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in December 2013, at a memorial for South African leader Nelson Mandela, seemed to offer symbolic new hope for improved Cuban-U.S. relations. Roughly a year later, in December 2014, after 18 months of secret negotiations fostered by Canada and the Vatican, Raúl and Obama stunned the world with the announcement that Cuba and the United States would be normalizing relations that had been suspended in January 1961. Both leaders appeared before national television audiences to make the announcement, though Raúl downplayed it somewhat as he emphasized the necessity of removing the U.S. economic, commercial, and financial blockade of Cuba, which, because it was codified by U.S. law, was beyond the scope of Obama’s executive authority and would require congressional action.

In July 2015, more than 50 years after they severed diplomatic relations, the United States and Cuba officially reopened their embassies in each other’s capital. Cuban-U.S. relations warmed further in March 2016 when Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the island in more than 80 years. The rapprochement between the two countries also included the loosening of travel and economic restrictions. Nonetheless, in the wake of Obama’s visit, Raúl remained wary of American influence on Cuba, cautioning that the United States was using its advocacy of the country’s growing private sector to undermine the Cuban system. In his speech to the Cuban Communist Party Congress in April, Raúl alternated between criticism of Cubans who had been resistant to the changes he had overseen and a warning not to rush headlong into change. To the disappointment of some younger party members who thought the time had come for a new generation to lead the country, the Congress opted for Raúl and his 85-year-old lieutenant, Jóse Ramón Machado Ventura, to lead the party into the next five-year period. Raúl already had indicated, however, that he planned to step down from the presidency in 2018.

Although Raúl had intended his retirement as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers to come at the end of his second term, in February 2018, he announced in December 2017 that he would delay that action until April 2018 so that he could continue to oversee the country’s efforts to recover from the damage caused by Hurricane Irma, which had clobbered Cuba’s northern coast in September 2017. Although Raúl remained chairman of the party, on April 19, 2018, he stepped down as president and was replaced by First Vice Pres. Miguel Díaz-Canel, who had cut a low profile despite having been Raúl’s handpicked successor. At age 57 Díaz-Canel represented a generational shift in leadership.

This change in leadership also roughly coincided with the drafting of a new constitution, which was approved in a referendum by Cuban voters in February 2019. While it maintained the Communist Party’s stranglehold on power and the primacy of the state-run economy, the new constitution also acknowledged the role of the market, recognized private property, and expanded social and political rights. During this period of transition, Cuban-American relations had begun to cool again after the election in 2016 of Donald Trump as the U.S. president. In 2017 the Trump administration reimposed strict restrictions on travel to Cuba, which had a significant impact on the island’s tourism-dependent economy. Moreover, Cuba was feeling the effects of the disruption to its supply of petroleum from Venezuela.

Cuba responded better than most countries to the public health challenges of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic, which originated in China in December 2019. However, as Cuba closed its doors to tourists as part of an effort to stem the spread of the potentially deadly virus, its already tottering economy went off the rails, and GDP plummeted by 11 percent in 2020, according to the government. Adding insult to injury, in late 2020 the Trump administration laid on new economic sanctions, including limitations on remittances. Even against the backdrop of these uncertain times, Raúl remained true to his word and stepped down as secretary-general of the party at the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in April 2021, saying that he was retiring with a sense of having “fulfilled his mission and confident in the future of the fatherland.” He was replaced as secretary-general by Díaz-Canel.