[Campaign Events] [News from Cuba] [International news and events] [UK Events] [Reviews]
COMPLETELY scotching rumours of ill-health, Fidel Castro made a more than six hour speech to inaugurate the Fifth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party on October 8th, the same day that 30 years ago the island learned of Che Guevara's death in Bolivia.
The Congress, meets roughly every five years, meets to decide the overall strategy and political direction that the country will take in the next five.
With rumours abounding that Fidel was preparing to stand down and might use the Congress as a platform to announce a succession process, all eyes were on the Conference Centre in Havana where the event took place. Even the BBC had a film crew in Cuba to cover the event.
In the end Fidel stole the show with a tour de force eliminating all doubt of his strength and putting all talk of his imminent retirement from public life on the back burner.
He was unanimously re-elected as the organisation's General Secretary and what changes there were to the leadership came in the announcement that both the Party's Political bureau and itscentral committee were to be reduced in size.
Melba Hernandez, heroine of the 1953 attack on the Moncada Garrison, announced the decision on behalf of the newly-elected Central Committee.
In emotional words, Hernandez spoke of the stature of Fidel as "a Cuban patriot who has forged the island's unity, and who is loved and trusted by his people."
Once ratified, Fidel announced that Raul had been re-elected as the Party's Second Secretary and presented the other 22 members of the Political Bureau. The new body has two fewer members than the last Political Bureau. Eight members were replaced and a group of young provincial leaders were brought into the Party's highest organ.
Among them, Party leaders of the provinces of Las Tunas, Santiago de Cuba, Cienfuegos and Holguin -- Micael Enamorado, Juan Carlos Robinson, Pedro Saes and Jorge Luis Sierra, respectively. Two other new members to the Political Bureau are Basic Industry Minister Marcos Portal and Eastern Army Chief Ramon Espinosa. Two women and five blacks sit on the Political Bureau.
Congress delegates elected a 150-member Central Committee by secret ballot from a slate drawn up through an exhaustive process over several months, that involved the Party's nearly 17,000 branches.
The new committee has 75 members fewer than the number elected in the previous Congress pointing to the quest for a more practical and efficient structure. Twenty women and make up the new Central Committee --13.3 percent of the membership. The average age is 47 years.
The Congress was the culmination of a process that involved more than 700,000 members of the organisation island wide. Its resolutions and guidelines set the pace for the strategies and actions that the country will undertake in the final years of this century and into the new millennium.
But there was no sign of significant changes in the political or economic direction for Cuba.
It reaffirmed that the Communist Party should remain Cuba's only legal party. Resolutions reiterated the Cuban government's view that dissidents on the island were U.S. hirelings bent on putting Cuba under American domination.
There was discussion of the market-oriented reforms introduced in the early 1990s and the need to combat the detrimental effects of the legalisation of dollars and limited self-employment, though there was no change in the plan to continue to attract tourism and foreign investment.
Most debate centred on grave problems with agriculture and ways to make state factories more efficient.
"What is not efficient is not socialist," Vice President Carlos Lage, the country's chief economic planner, said.
While Lage and President Castro blamed most of Cuba's economic problems on the U.S. economic embargo and accused the United States of damaging Cuban farms by spreading an agricultural pest, they also cited damage caused by last year's storms and economic inefficiency as causes of poor output.
The Party called for a crack down on crime associated with the small private sector and expressed concern about social divisions created by the relative wealth of some Cubans under the new reforms.
In his closing address, Fidel Castro said: "We are doing everything we can in the areas of tourism, hotels and all that, we're taking experience from everywhere, and the enemy knows it. That's why the enemy wants to scare the tourists off from here. We've talked about our problems very honestly, nobody can question the honesty with which we've expressed things here, and we see that there are many possibilities.
"I'm coming out of this congress with that conviction, I say it more convinced than ever, and we had strong convictions when we decided to save our homeland, the Revolution and Socialism, and struggle ahead without a socialist camp and without the Soviet Union and defend our ideas when everywhere people ran away and where communists swore they had given up their ideas, there are many people who gave up their ideas, but we reaffirm our ideals, and life and history are proving we're right."