HAVANA, (Reuters) – Cuba’s Communist Party chose the old guard to oversee a new economic course for the Caribbean island today, selecting President Raul Castro and First Vice President Jose Machado Ventura to lead the country’s highest political body.
The choice of Castro, who replaces his older brother Fidel Castro as first secretary of the ruling party’s Central Committee, was expected.
But Machado Ventura’s appointment as second secretary would likely disappoint Cubans and others hoping for new blood at the top of one of the last communist states in the world. He is viewed as a hardline communist ideologue.
The two aging communists will preside over the implementation of wide-ranging reforms to the island’s struggling Soviet-style economy approved on Monday at the party’s first congress in 14 years.
Castro, 79, and Machado Ventura, 80, fought in Cuba’s 1959 revolution and head the aging revolutionaries who have run the government for more than half a century since they helped topple U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Machado Ventura is a medical doctor who joined the Castro brothers early in their campaign from the Sierra Maestra mountains.
As first vice president of Cuba’s Council of State, he is first in line to succeed Raul Castro should the latter leave office.
Raul Castro said 15 people, including him and Machado Ventura, had been named to the powerful Political Bureau. Only three of them were new — reforms czar Marino Murillo, first secretary of the Communist Party in Havana Mercedes Lopez Acea, and Economy Minister Adel Izquierdo Rodriguez.
Former President Fidel Castro, 84, who had already said he had relinquished the first secretary position five years ago, made his first appearance at the congress. Wearing a blue gym suit, he had to be helped to his seat at the front of the congress.
While the reforms approved at the congress are the biggest changes to Cuba’s economy in decades, the leadership issue has loomed large at the four-day gathering since Raul Castro said in a speech on Saturday the party was considering limiting future leaders, including himself, to two five-year terms.
