• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 04 / 19 / 2011

---

Monday, 04.18.11.Results to be announced Tuesday at the end of Communist Party Congress.By Juan O. Tamayo. elnuevoherald.com

A crucial meeting of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party began voting Monday on its key agenda items — a new leadership for a party ruled by Fidel Castro since its founding in 1965, and a shift toward private enterprise for the island’s Soviet-styled economy.

The official Prensa Latina news agency distributed a photograph of Cuban ruler Raúl Castro casting a ballot marked “Candidacy for Central Committee membership.” A circle marked “Vote for All” was checked, indicating he did not pick and chose among the candidates.

Raúl Castro, 79, is expected to be elected as the party’s first secretary, replacing brother Fidel, who is 84. There’s been no hint on who might succeed Raúl as second secretary, but analysts will be watching for new faces in other leadership positions.

There’s been no word on the names of the candidates for the Central Committee, a leadership group of about 100 members or the more elite Political Bureau with 19 current members, including Fidel and Raúl Castro.

More than 1,000 delegates to the VI Communist Party Congress also began voting on a packet of reforms to the economy, pushed by Raúl Castro but revised in recent weeks amid reports of strong opposition to several items, such as deep and swift cuts in government spending.

The votes appeared to signal that the party Congress, its first in 14 years, was moving along with no snags despite the gravity of the issues before it. Results are expected to be announced at the final version of the conclave, expected to start at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

Fidel Castro, who claimed last month that he had surrendered his duties as first secretary when he suffered an intestinal infection that nearly killed him in 2006, has not attended the Congress sessions but wrote in a column Monday that he watched some, apparently on television.

He was impressed by the “high cultural level” of the young delegates, Castro wrote. “I cared less about what they said than the form in which they said it. They were so well educated and their vocabulary so rich that I almost could not understand them.”

The column appeared aimed at Raúl’s comment to the Congress on Saturday that Cuba needs to forge a new generation of leaders and that any major government or party job should have a limit of two consecutive five-year terms. Its top leaders are now all in their 80s and late 70s.

“The new generation has been called to rectify and change without hesitation everything that needs to be rectified and changed, and continue to show that socialism is the art of achieving the impossible,” the former Cuban leader wrote.

He made no mention of Raúl’s reforms — which would reduce the government’s dominant role in the economy, now centrally planned along Soviet-era lines, and open the door to private enterprise.

Instead, he wrote of his continuing dream of a selfless society and the threat of the “empire.”

“To overcome the system of capitalist production is undoubtedly a hard challenge in a barbaric time of consumerist societies that fuels and promotes the egotistical instincts of the human being,” he wrote.

The new generation of Cuban leaders should be “modest, studious and tireless fighters for socialism” he added, “and be capable of confronting the policy of the empire that endangers the human species.”

Source: //www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/18/2174137/cuban-communist-party-begins-voting.html#ixzz1JvFhuzti