Cubans wary of proposal
Raul Castro called for term limits. Dissidents say it's a way for him to hold on to power.
MIAMI - Dissidents in Cuba on Sunday dismissed Raul Castro's call for term limits, branding it an empty gesture designed actually to extend the Castro brothers' 52 years in power.
The proposal, if implemented, would mean Raul Castro would have to step down as head of government in 2018, when he would be 86. His older brother Fidel transferred power to him after emergency surgery in 2006. Fidel Castro was 79 then, as his brother is now.
The proposal is positive but "doesn't resolve our essential problem, which is the monopoly on power by a group whose policies have failed for 50 years," dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe said by phone from Havana.
The proposal is "a threat for the immense majority of the people because in this way the ruling elites are giving themselves 10 more years of totalitarian continuity," human-rights activist Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz said.
Raul Castro said Saturday at the opening session of the Sixth Communist Party Congress that party leaders had decided Cuba's one-party political formation needed to do a better job of finding and training younger members for promotions to top jobs.
"In that respect, we have arrived at the conclusion that it's a good idea to limit fundamental political and government jobs to a maximum of two consecutive periods of five years," Castro said during his 9,926-word speech.
The Congress was called to approve economic changes Raul Castro is pushing. The 1,000 delegates on Sunday dutifully endorsed his broad-brush proposals.
Some analysts praised Raul Castro's talk of term limits as recognition that Cuba must institutionalize its leadership structures because its "historic" generation - the top participants in the 1959 revolution - is in its 80s or late 70s.
Vice President Jose Ramon Fernandez is 87; First Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura is 80; and Vice President Ramiro Valdes, the youngest of the former revolutionaries, is 78.
Philip Peters, a Cuba expert with the Lexington Institute in the Washington suburbs, noted that Raul Castro's proposal did not allow for more than one party.
Angel Moya, a dissident recently freed after eight years in prison, said he would believe the hint of political change "when Raul resigns."
