Miguel Díaz-Canel
Miguel Díaz-Canel has been president of Cuba since April 2018 and first secretary of the Communist Party since April 2021, the first person to hold either office who was not a Castro and not born before the revolution, the electronics engineer with the grey hair and the Beatles records whom Raúl Castro chose as his successor after a decade of grooming. His years have been the worst since the special period of the 1990s. There was the pandemic that closed the tourism the economy lived on, the currency unification of January 2021 that abolished the convertible peso and set off an inflation of hundreds of per cent. There were the blackouts that by 2024 had the whole island dark for days at a time, the food and medicine shortages. There were the protests of 11 July 2021 in fifty towns, the largest since 1959, answered with a thousand arrests and sentences of up to twenty-five years. There was the emigration of more than a million Cubans, a tenth of the population, mostly to the United States through Nicaragua and the Mexican border, in three years. He was born in Placetas in Villa Clara in 1960, studied electronics at the Central University of Las Villas, served in the anti-aircraft forces, taught at the university. He rose through the Young Communists to be first secretary of the party in Villa Clara in 1994 at thirty-three, where he was seen on a bicycle and let a drag club open, and then in Holguín. He was minister of higher education from 2009, first vice-president from 2013. He became president by a vote of the National Assembly of 603 to 1 in April 2018, in which he said that Raúl would lead the decisions of the greatest weight. The presidency has been the reforms Raúl began carried a little further, with private small companies legalised in 2021 and now numbering ten thousand. There has been the state's refusal to go further, with Trump's sanctions restored in 2017 and tightened in 2025 and the Venezuelan oil gone. He has said the blockade is the cause and the protesters are counter-revolutionaries. He has said continuity, which is the word.
- Lived: 1960 CE – ?
- Nationality: Cuban
- Roles: president, politician
