Cuban Political Development

Before dawn on 1 January 1959, President Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba. Insurgents led by Fidel Castro (one among several insurgent groups) soon established control over the national territory. Fidel Castro served as Cuba’s prime minister and then also as president of the Council of State from 1959 until 2006. His brother Raúl Castro succeeded him; in 2018, he stepped down from his government roles while remaining first secretary of the Communist Party. The ruling teams have changed only very gradually—six of the seventeen-member Political Bureau chosen at the Sixth Communist Party Congress, held in 2016, had eight members born in 1945 or earlier, the first time this older group ceded the Political Bureau majority, and nine born between 1958 and 1967. The years since 1959 encompass four periods. The first, the revolutionary decade of the 1960s, endeavored to transform many aspects of public life and private behavior, in a context of a failing economy, under Fidel Castro’s highly personalized rule. The second, during the 1970s and 1980s, featured the development of the Communist Party and state institutions akin to those prevalent in other communist countries, more orthodox central planning of the economy, with strong backing and funding from the Soviet Union, as well as the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops and civilians overseas. The third, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the 1990s until 2006, exhibited a painful adjustment to greatly diminished economic circumstances and a mixed strategy to enact policy changes, some reminiscent of the 1960s and others pointing toward a market-oriented opening. The fourth, since 2006 under Raúl Castro’s leadership as Communist Party first secretary, adding since 2018 Miguel Díaz-Canel as president of the republic, has been marked by a gradual, albeit still limited, shift toward market-oriented policies and limited elements of political liberalization along with a tilt toward collective leadership and planned political succession. Across the four time periods, noteworthy changes have occurred in the economy, polity, and society, as well as in Cuba’s international circumstances.