After the Soviet Union collapsed, Miguel Diaz-Canel used a bicycle to get around his hometown of Santa Clara, a move that helped burnish the provincial party leader's popular touch - but one that also allowed him to turn up stealthily at work centers to check that nobody was stealing scarce goods.
Thirty years later, Diaz-Canel was this week named as Raul Castro's replacement as Cuba's president in a carefully managed succession from the Castro brothers' rule. Lacking their charisma and revolutionary credentials, the 58-year-old party apparatchik will again need all the stealth and popular goodwill he can muster to confront the challenges that the socialist island faces, reports Financial Times.
Much as when the USSR ended and pulled the plug on generous subsidies, Cuba's Soviet-style economy is on the rocks, US rhetoric and actions are rising, traditional allies such as Venezuela are in crisis and Cuba's ruling Communist party faces an uncertain future. "The received wisdom is there will be no change under Diaz-Canel, and he will spend his first year consolidating his position," said a European diplomat in Havana.
"But then he will have to deliver at least a sense of improved well being to Cubans even as he lacks the means to do so." Tall, broad-shouldered and with something of the good looks of actor Richard Gere, the silver haired Diaz-Canel was born into a family of factory workers in Santa Clara in central Cuba. His enjoyment of rock music, promotion of LGBT rights and use of an iPad seemingly casts him as a modernizer.
His youth, and the fact that he is often accompanied at public functions by his second wife, Lis Cuesta, also contrasts with the gerontocratic "historic generation" that led the 1959 revolution and has ruled since. That is a crucial change for younger Cubans, who no longer respond to tired stories of revolutionary heroes and pompous exhortations to sacrifice.
"His comfortable informality and accessibility suggests a different personal style than the retiring generation," said John McAuliff of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, a non-profit that supports closer ties between the US and former adversaries such as Vietnam, who recalls meeting him several years ago at a Havana reception. "He and his wife walked through the crowd enjoying the music of Los Van Van, working it like a US politician."
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