Raúl Castro announced Friday that he is stepping down as head of Cuba’s Communist Party, bringing an end to the more than six-decade reign of the Castros that began when his brother, Fidel, led the overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
The announcement raises questions regarding the island nation’s future at a time when many of its people are anxious about the state of the economy.
The coronavirus outbreak, with its accompanying business restrictions, wreaked havoc on the already-vulnerable communist economy, causing Cuba to witness an 11-percent shrinkage last year — a reduction driven largely by a drop in tourism and remittances. The resultant long food lines and shortages were reminiscent of the extended economic crisis, known as the Special Period, that took place in Cuba upon the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While Castro did not say whom he would choose as his successor as first secretary of the Communist Party, he has previously indicated that he favors Miguel Diaz-Canel, who succeeded Castro as president in 2018.
Diaz-Canel has given overtures to wanting to create a more open Cuban economy while maintaining the country’s one-party system. Earlier this year, he paved the way for more private enterprise by allowing Cubans to operate many self-run businesses from their homes.
The current Congress has on its agenda an overhaul of government-run enterprises, attracting investment from abroad, and enhancing legal protections for private business.
According to Cuba’s constitution, the Communist Party is given the charge of directing the country’s affairs. The party is currently made up of 700,000 activists.
Raúl Castro, 89, took over the presidency from his brother in 2008, two years after Fidel fell ill. Raúl then ascended to leadership of the party in 2011. Fidel Castro died in 2016.
Unbeknownst to many in the United States, Fidel Castro came to power thanks to the string-pulling of Deep Staters. The media made Castro out to be a freedom fighter, obscuring the fact that he was actually a communist. The New York Times celebrated him as the “George Washington” of Cuba while relentlessly demonizing Cuban President Fulgencio Batista.
Notably, Times writer Herbert Matthews (whose interview of Castro made the Marxist revolutionary out to be a hero) along with Board Chairman Arthur Sulzberger and publisher Orvil Dryfoos, were members of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Although voices such as U.S. ambassador to Cuba Arthur Gardner reported that Castro was in fact a communist, the government under President Dwight D. Eisenhower moved to remove Batista. While the United States hindered Batista, Castro was allowed to get all the arms from America and the Soviet Union that he needed to overthrow the increasingly embattled government, ensuring his victory.
Although the Kennedy administration attempted to oust Castro, the operation to do so with anti-communist Cubans failed due to sabotage from within the U.S. government.
As The New American’s Alex Newman, along with Frank de Varona (who was part of the Assault Brigade 2506 force sent to liberate Cuba from Castro), explained of the botched Pay of Bigs Invasion, globalist officials in the Kennedy administration made devastating last-minute changes to the plan that made failure certain:
The first problem was a last-minute decision to change the landing site. The original spot selected by the military and CIA planners was in the southern Cuban city of Trinidad — a site with many advantages. For one, it was next to the Escambray Mountains, where anti-communist rebels were already on the ground fighting the Castro regime. The original site also had docks, which were crucial to allow the obsolete Brigade ships to unload gasoline, oil, communications gear, and other critical supplies. Another key benefit of Trinidad was the presence of an airfield for Brigade planes. It had a defensible beachhead and a couple of roads that led to the city of Havana. The local population, numbering about 26,000, was dissatisfied with the regime and was expected to join and help the Brigade. There were also grocery stores with food and hospitals staffed by doctors for the wounded.
Instead, globalist officials in Washington, D.C., decided to change the landing site to the swampy, sparsely inhabited villages of Playa Girón and Playa Larga at the Bay of Pigs — landing spots with no real infrastructure, no docks, no local anti-communist forces to assist, and numerous other disadvantages.
… Possibly even more important to ensuring the invasion’s defeat was the inexcusable order canceling the overwhelming majority of the air sorties by Brigade pilots, intended to neutralize Castro’s air forces, his tanks, and more.
Be it in Cuba, China, or even with the Soviet Union itself, it has always been high finance working with the Deep State that has funded, promoted, and shielded Communism internationally even when, as a country, we were ostensibly fighting against it.
