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Fidel Castro resigns from head of Communist Party
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By Jeff Franks
HAVANA | Tue Apr 19, 2011 6:14pm EDT
(Reuters) - Cuba's Communist Party selected President Raul Castro and a hardline ally as its top chiefs on Tuesday, entrusting old guard leaders to steer wide-ranging reforms of the Caribbean island's tattered economy.
As expected, Raul Castro, 79, was chosen at a four-day party congress to replace his older brother Fidel Castro as first secretary of the ruling party's Central Committee.
Fidel Castro, now 84, quit all his leadership posts when he fell ill in 2006. He attended the final day of the congress.
But the appointment of First Vice President Jose Machado Ventura, 80, as second secretary signaled that Cuba's aging leadership was not yet ready for new blood at the top of one of the world's last communist states. He is viewed as a hardline communist ideologue.
Several other party leaders retained are in their 70s, veterans of the Cuban revolution and the one-party communist system it subsequently installed.
Raul Castro has described Cuba's Soviet-style economy, hamstrung by heavy state bureaucracy and battered by hurricanes and the global financial crisis in recent years, as teetering on the abyss and badly in need of reform. But he reiterated his intent was to save Cuba's socialist system, not abandon it.
"I assume my last job with the firm conviction and commitment ... to defend, preserve and continue perfecting socialism, and never permit the return of the capitalist regime," he said to applause from 1,000 congress delegates.
The two aging communists, Castro and Machado Ventura, will preside over the island's biggest economic changes in years, which were approved on Monday at the party's first congress since 1997.
The package of more than 300 reforms aims to reduce spending by the debt-ridden government, cut subsidies, give more autonomy to state enterprises and encourage more foreign investment in a general overhaul of the system. But central planning will remain.
In two of the bigger issues for average Cubans, the food ration all have received since 1963 will be phased out for those who do not need it and the buying and selling of homes will be permitted for the first time in many years, although likely with restrictions.
Some changes, including the slashing of more than a million government jobs, allowing more self-employment and leasing state land to private farmers, are already under way.
FEW NEW FACES IN POLITBURO
Raul Castro and Machado Ventura fought in Cuba's revolution and head the aging revolutionaries who have run the government and resisted U.S. pressure for political change since they helped topple U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
Age is a concern because President Castro said they had not groomed young leaders to replace them.
Raul Castro, who served as defense minister for 49 years under his older brother before formally replacing him as president in 2008, said on Saturday the party was considering limiting future leaders, including himself, to two five-year terms. The issue would be taken up at a party conference next January 28, he said.
Machado Ventura, a medical doctor who joined the Castro brothers early in their revolutionary campaign from the Sierra Maestra mountains, is first in line to succeed Raul Castro.
Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director at the Americas Society in New York, said the congress reminded him of salsa dancing where participants take "one step back, one step forward" and despite the back and forth "end up only slightly forward."
"There are signs of progression," he said, but "clearly, the appointment of Machado indicates the 'historicos' will continue to dominate the process."
Raul Castro said 15 people, including him and Machado Ventura, had been named to the powerful Political Bureau of the Central Committee.
Only three of them were new members -- reforms czar Marino Murillo, Havana Communist Party head Mercedes Lopez Acea and Economy Minister Adel Izquierdo Rodriguez.
MILITARY "SOUL OF REVOLUTION"
The Politburo also includes five generals, not counting Raul Castro, and former general Izquierdo, reflecting the military's growing role in the Cuban government and prompting an explanation from Castro.
"It is natural that it's that way," Castro said, citing an old quote from Fidel Castro that the "rebel army was the soul of the revolution."
He also pointed out there were 48 women on the 115-member Central Committee and 36 blacks and mixed-race people, both increases over previous numbers of these categories.
A son-in-law of Raul Castro, Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Calleja, an executive in Cuba's military business sector, was among those appointed to the Central Committee.
Fidel Castro, wearing a blue gym suit, had to be helped to his seat at the front of the congress and did not address the delegates, who applauded him warmly.
He has said he resigned from his party leader post, without publicly disclosing it, when he fell seriously ill in 2006. He wrote in state press on Tuesday he did not want to return.
"I think I have received too many honors. I never thought I would live so many years."
(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Cynthia Osterman)
Cuban anti-communist and former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles has been cleared on 11 charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and immigration fraud. Photograph: Juan Carlos Llorca/AP
Cuba has denounced as a "farce" the acquittal in the United States of Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent who is accused of terrorist attacks against the island.
The foreign ministry said Friday's verdict, which found the 83-year-old not guilty on all 11 counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and immigration fraud, showed the US continued to protect a known terrorist.
"This is an additional demonstration of the support and shelter the American authorities have historically given him," it said in a statement over the weekend.
A jury in El Paso, Texas cleared Posada Carriles after deliberating for just three hours, an unexpectedly swift climax to a closely watched 13-week trial which cast fresh light on the octogenarian's lengthy career as an anti-communist agent. The defendant, a hero to militant anti-Castro exiles, hugged his lawyers and told reporters he was grateful to the US, the court and the jury for what he said was a fair trial.
"What happened here should serve as an example for justice in my country, Cuba, which is unfortunately in the hands of a dictator."
Posada Carriles, who as a student came into contact with a young Fidel Castro, opposed the revolutionary government which seized power in 1959 and three years later joined a CIA-backed invasion by Cuban exiles.
The attack flopped but he escaped, was trained in sabotage by US handlers and spent the next decades plotting to kill Castro and other leftwing targets in the region.
He moved to Venezuela where he was accused of masterminding the 1976 suitcase bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet that killed 73 people, including the national fencing team. Months earlier his links with the CIA were severed, according to declassified US documents.
Posada Carriles escaped from a Venezuelan jail in 1985, where he spent eight years awaiting trial for the atrocity, which he denied, and resumed plotting against Castro. In an interview with the New York Times he took responsibility for 1997 bomb attacks against Cuba's tourist industry, which killed an Italian tourist in a Havana hotel, but later recanted the confession.
He was arrested in possession of explosives in Panama in 2000 and charged with plotting to assassinate Castro at a regional summit. He served four years in jail before being pardoned by Panama's outgoing president, Mireya Moscoso, prompting accusations of political cronyism between Panama, Cuban exiles in Miami and the Bush administration.
In 2005 Posada Carriles surfaced in Miami. The US refused Cuban and Venezuelan extradition requests, claiming he would not receive a fair trial in either country. Caracas and Havana accused the US of hypocrisy in allowing the region's most notorious terrorist to live freely and openly while amid the post 9/11 "war on terror".
Soon afterwards US authorities charged Posada Carriles with the relatively minor offences of lying to immigration officials about how he entered the US and his role in the Havana bombings. More than 20 prosecution witnesses testified in the court.
Jurors heard him speaking English in recordings by Ann Bardach, the New York Times journalist to whom he spoke about the bombings, despite later claiming he did not speak the language.
Observers expected convictions on at least some of the charges but the jury stunned prosecutors with a swift, unanimous and complete acquittal.
"We're obviously disappointed by the decision," said a justice department spokesman, Dean Boyd.
The head of Cuba's parliament, Ricardo Alarcon, accused the judge, Kathleen Cardone, of not allowing jurors to see crucial evidence.
"The stupid and shameful farce is over," he told AP. "There were things the jury did not know."
Venezuela's government denounced the trial and verdict as "theatre" and said Washington continued to shelter a mass murderer.
"The US government's protection of Posada Carriles has become an emblematic case of the US double standard in the international fight against terrorism," the foreign ministry said in a statement.
Posada Carriles's lawyer said he planned to return to his home and family in Miami. Leaders of Miami's Cuban exile community said he should be left to live in peace and that it was time to look ahead, not backwards.