Re-elected Díaz-Canel, everything remains the same in Castro's Cuba

Nothing new in Cuba, Castrism's island: in a country with a single-party regime, the PCC, and where any opposition is therefore illegal and severely repressed, it seems nothing new that President Miguel Díaz-Canel was re-elected for a second and final term in office by 459 of the 462 deputies in the National Assembly.  

His merits for this second term can be reduced to practically one: having maintained the essence of Castroism with an iron fist, that is, preventing the slightest movement of protest against the old communist regime that has ruled the island-prison that has been Cuba since 1959. And, within this, his greatest achievement was the demonstrations of July 2021, the most numerous and defiant demonstrations that the regime's political police had to face with all their forcefulness. It took a lot of courage to take to the streets and protest against the lack of freedoms in which the long-suffering Cuban people are suffocating, but such was the desperation that the protest movement soon spread to the country's major cities.  

According to the totalitarian handbook, the result of the repression of demonstrators who barely showed their protest orally and with the odd hurriedly produced banner was one death, a hundred injured and 1,300 arrested, who were immediately tried summarily and 500 of them sentenced to prison terms of up to 25 years. Many of those desperate enough to escape the clutches of the security forces sought the usual way out, to get off the island by any means and at any cost. In 2022, more than 300,000 Cubans were able to leave the island. Neither Díaz-Canel nor the other regime leaders seem to regret it. Such are the hardships suffered by the population that 300,000 fewer mouths to feed do not seem to cause much discomfort in the upper echelons, still overseen by Raúl Castro, who at 92 years of age continues to ensure that no one steps outside the narrow margins imposed by his omnipotent totalitarianism.  

In his new reinvestiture speech, President Díaz-Canel, who also holds the post of first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, promised the usual: "To solve the problems of inefficiency, in order to increase the supply of goods and services and control inflation". To which he added his own recurrent criticisms of his regime's own structures, criticising "bureaucracy, the indifference of officials in the performance of their work and the unacceptable corruption". In other words, the same vices that the regime, which has always blamed the US embargo for stifling Cuba, has to contend with. On this occasion, the only variable is that Díaz-Canel has blamed the asphyxiating bureaucracy of his regime for slowing down and hindering the country's progress, while acknowledging that Cuba is going through profound difficulties.  

Raúl Castro had tasked him in his first term of office with spearheading the economic reform the country needed, which consisted mainly of drastically reducing state jobs and allowing a timid opening up to tightly controlled private business. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to thwarting plans for reform towards a mixed economy. Rather, it has exacerbated the shortages of basic foodstuffs, as well as medicines and fuel, which the country has suffered increasingly desperately since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the end of fuel supplies from Chavista Venezuela following the collapse of the Bolivarian republic's oil production in 2010.  

Díaz-Canel did undertake a currency reform in 2021, ending the fiction of a parity exchange rate of 1 peso = 1 dollar. But far from solving the problem, the measure led to an inflationary spiral, in addition to the consequent sharp devaluation of the peso, which in just the last two years has gone from an official exchange rate of 24 pesos to 120 pesos to the dollar, although 185 pesos can be obtained on the black market for the greenback.  

In addition to Díaz-Canel, at the same session of the National Assembly, Vice-President Salvador Valdés Mesa was re-elected, as well as the President and Vice-President of Parliament, Esteban Lazo and Ana María Machado, respectively. So it is business as usual in what was once known as the Pearl of the Antilles.