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Havana (AFP)
A dire financial disaster and the “subversive” nature of the web have been on the agenda Saturday and Sunday as a historic congress of the Communist Celebration of Cuba meets forward of longtime chief Raul Castro’s departure from energy.
Some 300 delegates from throughout the nation are gathered in Havana for the congress, which started Friday and is being held behind closed doorways.
Castro, 89, will step down because the Communist Celebration of Cuba (PCC) first secretary — essentially the most highly effective place in Cuba — ending a close to six-decade household maintain on energy that began in 1959 below his revolutionary brother, Fidel, who died in 2016.
The official handover of energy to the primary non-Castro is predicted on the fourth and remaining day of the congress on Monday.
Within the meantime, the delegates have been divided into three working committees to give attention to the economic system, “ideological exercise,” plus the celebration and management promotion.
Most pressing on the agenda is the economic system, which plummeted by 11 % in 2020 — the worst decline since 1993 — thanks in no small half to current strengthening of the US embargo and the coronavirus pandemic.
On Friday, in his final main speech as celebration head, Castro known as for “revitalizing the method of updating the financial and social mannequin,” an initiative he started in 2008 with the cautious opening of the personal sector and overseas funding.
Cuba, with a inhabitants of roughly 11.2 million, faces recurrent shortages and should import 80 % of what it consumes for lack of adequate native manufacturing.
Nonetheless, Castro warned Friday that “there are limits that can’t be crossed” because the economic system opens “as a result of the results can be irreversible and would result in strategic errors, to the very destruction of socialism.”
– Social community ‘subversion’ –
One other sensitive topic in Cuba is the cellular web, which arrived on the island on the finish of 2018 and has strengthened residents’ calls for for civil society and is even utilized by some to encourage demonstrations, beforehand exceptional within the nation.
On Saturday, some 20 activists, unbiased journalists and artists stated on Twitter that that they had been prevented from leaving their houses by police, a way generally utilized by authorities to forestall dissident gatherings.
Slamming social networks for “subversion” and the propagation of what he known as faux information, Castro stated the platforms unfold “a digital picture of Cuba as a dying society with no future, on the purpose of collapse, giving out below a social explosion.”
The notion, which he stated was favored by the US, calls for “pressing transformation… on the ideological entrance.”
Ties with the US, after a historic however non permanent easing of tensions below president Barack Obama between 2014 and 2016, worsened below Donald Trump, who bolstered sanctions.
Castro will cross the reins to 60-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel, who has already served as Cuba’s president since 2018.
© 2021 AFP
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